tilde featuritis alert

[Decklin Foster <fosterd@hartwick.edu>]

I'm sure this has come up before, but being a relative rc newbie, I
really miss my '~' for home directory from bash. my question is, what
exactly is the pattern matching '~' in rc *good* for? can't you just
use 'switch' and end up with more readable code? couldn't we call it
'match'? is the lack of an sh-like '~' a personal preference of the
author, or just not feasible to implement due to rc's eval-once
semantics?

I know i probably ought to be quiet and retrain my fingers, but old
habits die hard. if i can't patch rc for this, how can i set up
readline to get along with it? my problem is that readline will do tab
completion on ~/wwwd<TAB> if i have a directory in my home called
wwwdocs. but it *won't* do anything with $home/wwwd<TAB>, presumably
since rc is not telling it what's in $home. i note that if I use bash,
$HOME/wwwd<TAB> magically becomes '/home/decklin/wwwdocs/'. bash must
know how interact a little more closley with readline. While this sort
of sets off my bloat detector, it's better than typing a ~, doing tab
completion, and then going back and changing it to $home.

One other thing - is there a replacement for the '~user' idiom? What's
the rc way? grep through /etc/passwd?

-- 
Decklin
Written with Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org/