Tilde expansion?

[BurtHarris]

Where does bash-style tilde expansion stand in powershell?

[rkeithhill]

For built-in commands, PowerShell already supports this. For native applications, there's an an experimental feature to support this. I forget which version it shipped in but it's in the latest stable 7.1.3. Enable the feature like so:

Enable-ExperimentalFeature PSNativePSPathResolution

You'll need to restart PowerShell for this change to take affect. After enabling this feature, you can then do this and it will work:

notepad ~\Documents\PowerShell\profile.ps1

[BurtHarris]

Ahh, so for cmdlets it depends on the type of parameter? I guess that covers it.

[rkeithhill]

Yup.

[rkeithhill]

To be clear, this isn't exactly the same as "globbing" as you've seen with echo ~. But it does solve the most common issue you run into in PS when invoking native apps e.g. vim ~\.gitconfig, notepad ~\.npmrc, etc.

[ninmonkey]

For commands that don't support globbing, you can pipe from gi, gci, or resolve-path

# echo all log files
Get-Item "~\**\*.log" | Get-Content
# or
Resolve-Path "~\**\*.log" | Get-Content

That works with PSNativePSPathResolution = $false

[GMZwinge]

@ninmonkey If the path does not exist, Get-Item and Resolve-Path fail. In this case $ExecutionContext.SessionState.Path.GetUnresolvedProviderPathFromPSPath('~\<nonExistentPath>') seems to work (from x0n response to Powershell: resolve path that might not exist?). But is there something else more simple?

[alihaiderismail]

Note that PSNativePSPathResolution was removed in Powershell 7.3. The new way to achieve this is PSNativeWindowsTildeExpansion which is enabled PowerShell 7.5-preview.2. See Using Experimental Features in PowerShell.

[RokeJulianLockhart]

https://github.com/orgs/PowerShell/discussions/15263#discussion-3326069

@BurtHarris, why not merely use $HOME? POSIX or the HFS (I forget which) mandate that $Env:HOME exist, and PowerShell creates a $HOME variable which points to $Env:HOME when $IsLinux = $True, or Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.UserProfile) when $IsWindows = $True. ~ is a bash-ism — not even POSIX-compliant — so I fail to see why supporting that would be desirable.