ln complains about no such file or directory

Question

I'm new in shell programming on macosx and have a little problem. I've written the following shell script:

#!/bin/sh

function createlink {
source_file=$1

target_file="~/$source_file"

if [[ -f $target_file ]]; then
    rm $target_file
fi

ln $source_file $target_file
}

createlink ".netrc"

When I'm executing this script I get the message ln: ~/.netrc: No such file or directory and I don't know why this happened! Do you see the error? Thanks!

Dyslexia

If run in your home directory, this script will first rm the named file and then fail to link to a file that isn't there. if [[ $PWD == $HOME ]] ; then echo "error message"; exit 1; fi should help you avoid that. – Frosted

Answer 1

The issue is that tilde expansion will not happen as the path is in a variable value (tilde expansion happens before variable expansion). You can ameliorate this issue by using $HOME instead of ~. That is

target_file="${HOME}/${source_file}"

This should solve your problem.

Further reading: EXPANSION section of man bash

Yung