Why isn’t tilde (~) expanding inside double quotes? [duplicate]

by

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 [ -d "$HOME/.git" ]

From POSIX in Tilde expansion:

A “tilde-prefix” consists of an unquoted character at the beginning of a word, followed by all of the characters preceding the first unquoted in the word, or all the characters in the word if there is no .

From POSIX in Double Quotes:

Enclosing characters in double-quotes ( “” ) shall preserve the literal value of all characters within the double-quotes, with the exception of the characters dollar sign, backquote, and backslash, as follows:

You can find further explanations in Why doesn’t the tilde (~) expand inside double quotes? from the Unix & Linux Stack.

More Related Contents:

  1. How to manually expand a special variable (ex: ~ tilde) in bash
  2. Tilde in path doesn’t expand to home directory
  3. How does the leading dollar sign affect single quotes in Bash?
  4. Expansion of variables inside single quotes in a command in Bash
  5. How can I do a recursive find/replace of a string with awk or sed?
  6. How to add a progress bar to a shell script?
  7. How can I write a heredoc to a file in Bash script?
  8. What is the purpose of “&&” in a shell command?
  9. Is there a list of ‘if’ switches anywhere?
  10. Bash script and /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory [duplicate]
  11. How to get the primary IP address of the local machine on Linux and OS X? [closed]
  12. How to suppress Terminated message after killing in bash?
  13. Setting an environment variable before a command in Bash is not working for the second command in a pipe
  14. Delete all lines beginning with a # from a file
  15. Copy folder recursively, excluding some folders
  16. How to loop through dates using Bash?
  17. Why does getopts only work the first time?
  18. Building R Packages using Alternate GCC
  19. Running programs in parallel using xargs
  20. find -exec with multiple commands
  21. How do I read user input into a variable in Bash?
  22. What is the best way to count “find” results?
  23. Count number of lines in a git repository
  24. How do I check if a directory exists or not in a Bash shell script?
  25. bash “if [ false ];” returns true instead of false — why?
  26. Using conditional statements inside ‘expect’
  27. shell script respond to keypress
  28. reverse the order of characters in a string
  29. What’s the cmd/PowerShell equivalent of back tick on Bash?
  30. Why doesn’t my terminal output unicode characters properly?

Leave a Comment