From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2004-01-03T12:04:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Dir.chdir '~'

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 09:22:02PM -0500, Tim Heaney wrote:
> 
>>Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@PATH.Berkeley.EDU> writes:
>>
>>
>>>Does anyone know why this happens?
>>>
>>>$ irb
>>>irb(main):001:0> Dir.chdir '~'
>>>=> 0
>>>irb(main):002:0> Dir.chdir '~'
>>>Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - ~
>>>         from (irb):2:in `chdir'
>>>         from (irb):2
>>>$ ruby -v
>>>ruby 1.8.1 (2003-12-25) [i686-linux]
>>
>>You must be starting out in a directory with a ~ subdirectory that
>>does not itself have a ~ subdirectory. Thus the first time you change
>>to directory ~ it succeeds, but the second time it fails.
> 
> 
> More to the point, I think is that Ruby doesn't expand ~ the way 
> the UNIX shells do.  What you probably want is Dir.chdir(ENV['HOME']).

Ok. I guess I have to expand_path if I want that behavior.

irb(main):001:0> File.expand_path '~'
=> "/home/vjoel"

Thanks!