Re: I have a question...

[haltarac@coyote.rain.org (Henri Altarac)]

David Emery (emery@goldfinger.mitre.org) wrote:
: The easiest way to 'solve' this problem is to expand the "~" into the
: home directory.  The environment variable "HOME" contains the pathname
: of the home directory.  Thus it's pretty trivial to implement an
: operation that replaces (all) occurances of "~" in a pathname with the
: string value of HOME.  

Don't forget that ~user can also be used and expands into user's
home directory. 

: To be more accurate/precise, the best thing to do is to obtain the
: pathname to the home directory from the /etc/passwd file, since the
: value of HOME could have been changed by the user.

The passwd file cannot be used if your system is running the Yellow pages.

On SUN, there is a service 'getpwnam' that does the ~user translation. 


Henri Altarac
-----
haltarac@rain.org	(805)683-3045