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Emulation of ~ (tilde) expansion for native utilities is incomplete #11386
Description
Note:
-
~expansion for native utilities currently fundamentally only works on Unix platforms - but Windows would benefit from it too: see Resolve file paths before passing to native commands #10675 -
Fully emulating the logic of
~expansion in PowerShell requires recognizing partial quoting of sub-tokens in arguments (e.g.,~/'foo bar'), which may turn out to be a challenge based on how argument parsing currently works.
Steps to reproduce
On a Unix-like platform:
# Quoting the argument as a whole always suppresses ~ expansion.
/bin/echo '~/foo' | Should -Be '~/foo'
# Both commands should expand ~ to the value of $HOME,
# because the ~/ prefix is unquoted.
/bin/echo ~/foo | Should -Not -BeLike '~/*'
/bin/echo ~/'foo bar' | Should -Not -BeLike '~/*'Expected behavior
All tests should succeed.
Actual behavior
The 3rd test fails, because the partially quoted argument prevented ~ expansion - even though ~/ is unquoted.
Expected like wildcard '~*' to not match '~/foo bar', but it did match.
Note that in POSIX-like shells - whose behavior here is being emulated - /bin/echo ~/'foo bar' indeed expands ~, as expected.
Environment data
PowerShell Core 7.0.0-rc.1
Activity
Zenexer commentedon Dec 19, 2019
It's also missing support ~username syntax; for example, if I have a user
foowith a home directory of/home/foo, even if I'm currently running as userbar,~foo/testshould expand to/home/foo/test. I don't think it's too important to prioritize that feature, since it's not widely known, but I figured I'd mention it.rkitover commentedon Mar 14, 2020
No, I believe the ~user expansion is widely known, at least among linux developers and power users and is VERY useful.
E.g., I'm setting up an account for a friend on my windows server, I may want to do something like:
It should tab complete the expansion too.
SteveL-MSFT commentedon Apr 18, 2020
~username expansion should be a separate issue