In the bash manual, note that brace expansion during parameter substitution, but not recursively: The order of expansions is: brace expansion; tilde expansion, parameter and variable expansion, arithmetic expansion, and command substitution (done in a left-to-right fashion); word splitting; and filename expansion. This implies that any tilde (or parameter references or command substitution) stored unexpanded … Read more
The problem has to do with the tilde being within double quotes. To get it expanded, you need to put the tilde outside the quotes: if [ -d ~/”.git” ]; then # note tilde outside double quotes! echo “Do stuff” fi Or, alternatively, as commented below by hek2mgl, use $HOME instead of ~: if [ … Read more
You can do (without quotes during variable assignment): a=~/Foo cd “$a” But in this case the variable $a will not store ~/Foo but the expanded form /home/user/Foo. Or you could use eval: a=”~/Foo” eval cd “$a”
If the variable var is input by the user, eval should not be used to expand the tilde using eval var=$var # Do not use this! The reason is: the user could by accident (or by purpose) type for example var=”$(rm -rf $HOME/)” with possible disastrous consequences. A better (and safer) way is to use … Read more