Bash

[yegnal]

At my wits end with this one

Trying to write a script that will not only work on my machine, but if shared too. In that regard, I would need to refer to the ~/ or home directory in a script. What I'm learning is that this is virtually impossible.

I've tried:

myHome=~
eval myHome=$myHome
#echo $myHome

But at the end of the day, it's not working. It will echo correctly to the screen, but I'm utterly unable to use these methods to construct a path to files in the home directory, and then cp files from ~/whatever to wherever, which is beyond frustrating.

[VMC]

someone=$(whoami)

[SeijiSensei]

Using whoami is good choice. The $() construct in bash tells the shell to execute the command it finds inside the parentheses and return the result as a string.

Usually systems create "environmental variables" like $USER and $HOME when someone logs in.

seiji@Linux:~$ echo $USER
seiji
seiji@Linux:~$ echo $HOME
/home/seiji

Now if you're trying to write a script that would run correctly across all platforms and shells, that's way beyond my abilities. In fact, I'm not sure it's possible. Even on Linux, you can have different shells with different commands and environments. In scripts, it's always a good idea to specify bash explicitly like:

#!/bin/bash
echo $USER
echo $HOME

You can see the entire array of default environment variables with the "printenv" command.

[GhX6GZMB]

NEVER!!! use ~ in a script. It's a convenient shortcut on some keyboards, nothing else. Only a shell can work with ~, most other programs (including the Kernel) have no idea what it is.
The correct way is to use $HOME (environment variable which ~ translates to). Always works.

Cheers.

[yegnal]

When I run a test script

myHome=$(whoami)
myPathVariable='/home/'$myHome'/Documents/'
echo $myPathVariable

I get /home/me/Documents/

but when trying to copy I get
cp: cannot stat '/home/root/Documents

Where does the work root come in ? ! ?. The script is being run as SUDO, and I can make the copy of the file in a terminal directly no problem, just not working as a script......

[yegnal]

myPathVariable=$HOME'/Documents/'

echo's correctly in terminal, error as before trying to copy a file.

Error is: cp: cannot stat '/home/root/Documents

It's being run as sudo, can't figure what the issue is..

[yegnal]

So, a simple test using

$HOME'/Documents/'

to copy a file works, I'm now guessing because I'm trying to copy to /usr/share/..... I'm getting some issue that even running as sudo is not allowing.

Any guesses...

The permissions are good, I think...

-rwxrwxr-x 1 me me

do I need to add a sticky bit or something ?

[GhX6GZMB]

As no one knows what you're trying to do, just read post #4 again.

[GhX6GZMB]

Why are you using quotes? Example: $HOME/Documents is the same as ~/Documents

[Holger_Gehrke]

sudo means "switch user and do", but unless you tell it what user to switch to (by giving the option -u followed by a username) it will switch to the system administrator which on Unix-like systems is called root and has '/root/' as the home directory.

Try this:

sudo bash -c 'echo $HOME'

If this shows '/root' then either the security policy in /etc/sudoers is set to run sudo as if the -H option is in effect ('Defaults always_set_home') or sudo is aliased to 'sudo -H'. With the -H option sudo sets HOME to the home directory of the user to which you are switching.