Support "~" in pathnames
Describe the feature
Add support for "~" in pathnames, like how shells handle "~".
This feature was requested by Madhu in a private email to @rtoy (because he also no has access to the mailing list).
Is there a prototype?
Madhu sent a patch for this.
0001-expand-in-pathnames.patch
Describe the feature in more detail
The basic idea is to have "~" at the start of a pathname be equivalent to the user's home directory, like how shells work. Madhu says ecl, mkcl, clisp, ccl, and lispworks, at least, support this. It would be a bonus to support "~user" like shells do, but my own experiments show that ccl just returns $HOME
and ecl produces some weird error about an unknown user. clisp appears to do the expected thing. This was tested using (directory "\~games")
, where "games" is a valid user on my linux system.