Expand Tilde Paths in Bash and Python

Sometimes it’s necessary to reference files in a script using ~. For example, if you want to schedule a cron job to run a script in a folder and place the results in the same folder, it’s helpful to use absolute referencing of the files in the script.

Bash

Here’s my first attempt to append to a file:

$ ./my_folder/run.sh >> "~/my_folder/output.txt"
-bash: ~/my_folder/output.txt: No such file or directory

The issue with the above line is that the ~ is not expanded to the home directory (such as /home/username/) because it is inside the quotes. To fix this, move the path outside of the quotes, but leave the filename in single quotes (to escape the . in the extension):

$ ./my_folder/run.sh >> ~/my_folder/'output.txt'

Python

I encountered a similar issue in Python:

>>> with open('~/my_folder/output.txt', 'r') as f:
...   contents = f.read()
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '~/my_folder/output.txt'

This can be fixed using os.path.expanduser(path):

>>> import os
>>> filename = os.path.expanduser('~/my_folder/output.txt')
>>> with open(filename, 'r') as f:
...   contents = f.read()
...
>>> print(contents)
10