Read first about globbing, notably glob(7). For the expansion of path starting with tilde ~
consider wordexp(3) and glob(3).
For showing a path starting with the home directory, you need to get that home directory. You could use getenv(3) like getenv("HOME")
(there are rare pathological cases where that could fail) or getpwuid(3) (or even getpw(3)) on the result of getuid(2). The home directory (when getpwuid
succeeds) is given by the pw_dir
field. See also credentials(7) (and execve(2)...)
There are rare pathological cases where getenv("HOME")
and getpwuid(getuid())
fail or give unconsistent results (about the user's home directory). I believe you should detect failure, but you might not care about inconsistency. See also environ(7). You could even consider the GNU specific secure_getenv(3).
BTW, you could cache the home directory, i.e. compute it once in your shell. It is unlikely to change often.
You could also decide to canonicalize a path using realpath(3).
You certainly have corner cases: do you want to display /home/john/../mary/
as ~/../mary
, as /home/mary/
, as ~mary
, (or even leave it as /home/john/../mary
) assuming your process is running under john
uid? (and both john
and mary
exist as user names in passwd(5) with home directories /home/john/
and /home/mary/
). And what about /home/john/../../proc/$$/maps
(see proc(5))?
You need to decide how you'll handle these corner or pathological cases, and document the behavior of your shell.
(the functions mentioned have a C API, you might want to use extern "C"
in your C++ code)