Precedence in operators issue

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello,
I am trying to write a small acript to change directory to $HOME depending on the user logged in. However when i provide this command
say,

ABC_USER=myself
cd ~${ABC_USER} i am getting the following error,

ksh: ~myself: not found

I know i am doing something really silly but not able to figure out what it is. I know i could get the value of the home directory by doing a grep on /etc/passed file but i think it is not a good solution.

Can anyone help or have encountered this issue before? I am thinking this issue is one of precedence where "~" is evaluated before the "$".

Anyone??

2

It works for me...if the user is in /etc/passwd...

$
$ ABC=mail
$ grep mail /etc/passwd
mail:x:8:12:mail:/var/spool/mail:/sbin/nologin
mailnull:x:47:47::/var/spool/mqueue:/sbin/nologin
$ cd ~${ABC}
$ pwd
/var/spool/mail
$
$ ABC=fubar
$ cd ~${ABC}
ksh: cd: ~fubar: [No such file or directory]
$
3

Thanks for your quick reply Perdarabo.

I am using /bin/ksh . Could it be it does not work in that shell?

echo $SHELL. Can you tell me what shell you are using?

4

I'm using ksh just like you. Look closely in my post toward the bottom. The shell id'ed itself in the error message. My OS was RedHat 5.

5

Thanks .. i fixed it by grepping the path from /etc/password and changing it to that location. However the below approach did not work for me on HPUX 11.23