Tilde in path doesn't expand to home directory
You can do (without quotes during variable assignment):
a=~/Foocd "$a"But in this case the variable $a will not store ~/Foo but the expanded form /home/user/Foo. Or you could use eval:
a="~/Foo"eval cd "$a"
You can use $HOME instead of the tilde (the tilde is expanded by the shell to the contents of $HOME).Example:
dir="$HOME/Foo";cd "$dir";
Although this question is merely asking for a workaround, this is listed as the duplicate of many questions that are asking why this happens, so I think it's worth giving an explanation. According to https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_06:
The order of word expansion shall be as follows:
Tilde expansion, parameter expansion, command substitution, and arithmetic expansion shall be performed, beginning to end.
When the shell evaluates the string cd $a, it first performs tilde expansion (which is a no-op, since $a does not contain a tilde), then it expands $a to the string ~/Foo, which is the string that is finally passed as the argument to cd.