I've looked for a while, and it seems that there is no easy way to do
this, not even in bash, and worse with /bin/sh. So this is kind of
resorting to a simple parsing of the input, and using `eval' if it
starts with a tilde. Note the hack of not doing that when there is a
space, otherwise the `eval' thing will silently ignore it.
This hack means that it's easy to get into a mess if quotes are used
after a tilde, but that was already the case with the use of `eval' to
handle environment variables. It's not a real security issue, however,
since we're talking about a user who can just run any command anyway.
Also including a test file for the expansion functionality. If anyone
wants to improve this code, making the tests pass would reveal the
tricky issues.
[FWIW, I've asked on the #bash channel, and the only serious suggestion
was getting the paths as command-line arguments. This will, however,
defeat the point of being newbie friendly...]
Closes PR 12893.
* The installer is a command-line argument.
* Make it work in xterm too, by unsetting TERM.
* Works with version-less directories, from release installers.
It's now simpler, shorter, and better. Some of the text is revised,
accepts environment variables when asked for the path, some additional
fixes in misc places.