On Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 3:27 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

Joy's cshell came out as part of 2BSD (which was V7 based), but he had released "ashell" before that and included it in the original BSD (a.k.a. 1BSD) which was for V6 [what I don't remember is if it supported the convention and I can not easily un-ar(1) the cont.a files in the 1BSD tar image in Warren's archives.

Looking at the ashell sources on the 1BSD tuhs utree viewer suggests that ~ wasn't there yet, but that it was planned:

sh.c:

...

	Features remaining to be fixed up and/or implemented
	======== ========= == == ===== == === == ===========

...

 * Changes to glob to allow ~, prevent too long path, and prevent
 * perhaps running out of directories.

...

Looking at glob.c, there's no ~ nor 126/176/7e in the sources. Editing the cont.a archive directly confirms no ~ or similar constant is present.

By 2BSD, it was in sh.glob.c in the 'expand' function. Later versions define TILDE as '~' and used that. V7 had no ~ in the shell, but as you point out uucp there supported ~ for user home directories. V6 didn't have any of this included that I can find.

Warner