Re: Default PATH setting - reduce to something more sensible?

Kenny McCormack wrote:

In article <ccr96l-eot.ln1@ID-313840.user.individual.net>,
Geoff Clare  <netnews@gclare.org.uk> wrote:
...

Yes.  Perhaps I trimmed too much.  The post I was replying to said
"$HOME/bin [..] is better than ~/bin, because tilde expansion is not,
AFAIK, included in POSIX" and $HOME is also, of course, expanded before
PATH is assigned.  So there is no reason to prefer $HOME/bin over ~/bin
since (when used in an assignment) they are equivalent in POSIX.

 
1) I have no idea what your beef with Kaz is.  It seems silly at best.

No beef. Quite the opposite in fact - I was attempting to be apologetic
for having written something that could be misinterpreted (because I
trimmed too much).

2) I know this isn't going to sit well with you, but there absolutely are
situations (in bash) where ~ doesn't work as a substitute for $HOME, when
setting the various "path" variables.  I know that I had lines in .profile
and/or .bashrc like: PATH=~/bin:$PATH (and similar) that did not work (that
is, the value stored in the variable contained an explicit tilde rather
than the expanded value - and this, of course, doesn't work at runtime).
Replacing the tilde with $HOME fixes this.
 
Sorry I don't have details, but it is true nonetheless.

As others have already pointed out, it's probably because you quoted the
tilde.  Which means when I carefully put the caveat "when used in an
assignment" into what I wrote about equivalence of $HOME/bin and ~/bin,
I wasn't careful enough - I should have written "when used in an
unquoted assignment".

--
Geoff Clare <netnews@gclare.org.uk>