Add function to OS interface to get a user's home directory
Describe the feature
Add function to return user's home directory so can support "~" and "~user" in pathnames mentioned in #266 (closed).
Is there a prototype?
No actual prototype is available, but we can unify the OS-dependent parts into C.
Describe the feature in more detail
While we can use unix-getpwnam
to get the needed information, it
seems a bit overkill to use that when what we really just want is the
home directory. So it's probably best to add an OS function to do
just that. Of course, this function will need to use getpwnam
to
get the info, but we don't need to expose the full generality of
getpwnam
for this. And @cshapiro says this makes a lot of sense
since win32 has provided such a function for a long time.