Re: [Groff] gtroff & soelim don't recognize ~ in paths

[Keith Marshall]

On Monday 10 April 2006 11:19 pm, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > > I'm used to it working in vi(m) and I seem to remember it working
> > > in awk. I've also seen it work in X11-based file dialogs. Over
> > > time, I suppose I've come to assume that ~ was a Un*x idiom rather
> > > than a shell idiom.
> > 
> > Agreed; why shouldn't it work in groff?  It should be relatively
> > straightforward to implement it (looks the other way).
>
> Consider this:
>
>   .tr ~X
>   .so ~/foo/bar

And you might also consider this, in the bash *shell*:

  $ dir='~'
  $ ls $dir
  ls: ~: No such file or directory

Yes, that's a contrived example of a situation where it doesn't even work 
in the shell, but it can have practical implications: say the `dir' 
variable is assigned, in an interactive script, by a `read' command; in 
this case using the response directly will fail, if the user adopts the 
tilde idiom.  (The work around, of course, is to `eval' the subsequent 
expansion of the reply):

  $ eval ls $dir
  file1   file2    file3    ...

Regards,
Keith.