tilde expansion in environment variable

Question

In my .sh file, I have this, cp $file $SOME_PATH, while $SOME_PATH is exported as export SOME_PATH="~/path/to/path/". But when I ran this .sh file, I got error message saying like * no such "~/path/to/path/" exists.* I replaced ~ as $HOME, then the error was gone. So what's up here with the tilde?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Remove the quotation marks on your export:

export SOME_PATH=~/path/to/path/

Answer 2

You want the shell to expand ~, but it will not be expanded in a script since it's treated as a literal string "~". You can force expansion via eval like this.

#!/bin/bash

homedir=~
eval homedir=$homedir
echo $homedir # prints home path

Answer 3

use

SOME_PATH=~/path/to/path/

if you path have spaces, quote it

SOME_PATH=~/"path with spaces"