Re: cd to the user's home dir

[Andrey Tykhonov]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> Andrey Tykhonov <atykhonov@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I would like to be able to `cd' into the user's home
>> directory in the same way as I can `cd' in the shell:
>>
>> cd ~admin
>>
>> I try in Emacs:
>>
>> M-x cd RET ~admin RET
>>
>> but it doesn't work. Emacs seems doesn't provide such
>> functionality. Am I wrong?
>
> `cd' changes the "default directory" of the current
> buffer - e.g., so when you `find-file' in that buffer,
> the prompt will by default be pointed at that
> directory, as the most likely place you would want to
> look.
>
> I don't really get what you want


Well, I have many projects which paths are long and it is very often
required to `cd' to one of them. Very often and time consuming. For a shell
I resolved such an issue by means of creating system user (I'm on Linux)
and now I can just (with auto completion and quite nice representation in
the PS1):

cd ~username

where username is a system user's home directory which is the project
root. Well, `username' in my case is just a project's name.

Such thing is quite good and handy for me and I would like the same but in
Emacs, thus I want to be able to change "default directory" of the current
buffer to the user's home directory.

I just wrote these simple functions which does allow to do described thing:

(defun system-users ()
  (split-string
   (shell-command-to-string "grep -o '^[^:]*' /etc/passwd | tr '\n' ' '") " "))

(defun cu (user)
  "cd to the USER's home directory."
  (interactive
   (list
    (completing-read "User: " (system-users))))
  (setq default-directory
        (replace-regexp-in-string "\n" "" (shell-command-to-string
                                           (format "grep %s /etc/passwd | cut 
-f 6 -d :" user))))
  (call-interactively 'ido-find-file))

Well, it doesn't change default-directory but just calls ido-find-file with
the user's home directory which is good.

Now I just wonder: is there any similar functionality in Emacs? Is there
any way to cd to specific user's home directory?
  
P.S. I'm sorry for the previous mail personally sent to you before.

> - with dired, to show
> the home directory's files:
>
> (dired "~")
>
> or perhaps:
>
> (dired (getenv "HOME"))
>
> - is that what you look for?