have to determine all users home directories - tilde scripting problem

Question

Assume someuser has a home directory /home/someuser

NAME=someuser

In bash - what expression to I use combining tilde (~) and $NAME to return the users home directory?

HOMEDIRECTORY=~someuser
echo $HOMEDIRECTORY
/home/someuser
NAME=someuser
echo ~$NAME
~someuser

any suggestions?

Answer 1

one alternative way

awk -F":" '{print "user: "$1", Home directory is: "$6}' /etc/passwd

Answer 2

Tilde ( ~ ) it's the same as $HOME so, not all the user will have as root to home the same directory.

But if you insist in using the tilde this do the work:

echo ~/../$NAME

See:

$ pwd
/home/oreyes
$ export NAME=john 
$ export DIRECTORYNAME=~/../$NAME
$ cd $DIRECTORYNAME
$ pwd
/home/john

Answer 3

Interesting difference between bash and csh, where ~$VARNAME actually does what you'd expect!

This is ugly, but it seems to work in bash:

homedir=`eval "echo ~$USERNAME"`

Now $homedir holds the home directory associated with $USERNAME.

Answer 4

If you have access to getent:

getent passwd "$NAME" | cut -d: -f 6

Answer 5

Safer:

eval HOMEDIRECTORY="$(printf "~%q" "$NAME")"

Here the %q option to printf quotes and escapes dangerous characters.

If $NAME is joe, you'd get something like /home/joe. For root, you might get /root. For "abc;rm something" you'd get "~abc;rm something" instead of having something removed.

Answer 6

Thank you one and all- the difficulties I FACED were getent isn't available the user accounts are maintained in t third party database, not /etc/passwd

There are user accounts that are derivations of each other (sys and system, etc)

eval works great