Stupid bash scripting question

[John Abreau]

On Wed, 24 Aug 2005, Cole Tuininga wrote:

> 
> Ok - I'm sure the answer to this is simple, but I can't seem to figure
> the darned thing out.  In my defense, it's extremely rare that I do any
> shell scripting.  8)
> 
> Basically, the deal is that I have a variable that contains a string
> such as "~username".  I'd like to actually expand that to the user's
> home directory.

How about

    eval "echo ~$user"

or

    FOO=$(eval "echo ~$user")

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