7

Since ~, . and .. are special directories, why are they handled differently in the following example?

$ echo ~
/home/tim
$ echo ..
..
$ echo .
.
  1. ~ is expanded into the dir, but the other two are not.
  2. The other two are expanded literally, but ~ isn't.
Braiam
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Tim
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    ~ is not a directory, it is a construct of your shell and does not truly exist. – casey Jul 31 '14 at 16:08
  • . is not (the name of) a directory either, but ~ refers to your home directory as . refers to the current directory and .. refers to the parent directory. – iconoclast Jan 16 '15 at 03:02

1 Answers1

18

~ is a special name expanded by the shell, . and .. are real proper directory names, so no expansion is done by the shell there.

Ulrich Schwarz
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    For example, type ls -a and you'll see the . and .. directories. The only reason they're not usually shown is that anything beginning with . is hidden by default. – Useless Jul 31 '14 at 17:30
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    Another way to see the difference is to quote it: ls -ld '~' will give an error (unless there's a file of directory named ~ in the current directory) while ls -ld '.' will show information about the current directory. – celtschk Jul 31 '14 at 18:15
  • +1 Might also be useful to mention the fact that . is a hard link to the current directory and .. is a hard link to the current directory's parent. – Joseph R. Aug 24 '14 at 01:51
  • . is not a directory name, unless you issue mkdir '.' – iconoclast Jan 16 '15 at 03:03