Bash terminal does not recognize a path in a variable because of the "~"

Question

For example if I type ~ or ~/Documents as an input I get the message : No such file or directory

However if I use /home/username/Documents it works fine.

echo "Dose onoma katalogou"

read Directory

find $Directory -type f -perm 777

Any idea on why this happens and how I could fix it in order to be able to type pathnames including "~"?

Answer 1

bash expands the variable $Directory after it expands any ~, thus once $Directory is expanded, the time to expand ~ has passed.

eval find $Directory -type f -perm 777

will work because eval will see the ~ and run shell expansion again.

You may test the effect by simpler commands:

tilde='~'
echo $tilde            # prints a literal ~
eval echo $tilde       # prints your home directory

By the way, a directory names containing blanks will cause problems.