A Quoted ~ in PATH Works in Bash and Silently Becomes a Relative Path Everywhere Else

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 08:30:00 +0530

Put export PATH="$PATH:~/.local/bin" in your .bashrc and everything appears to work. kek resolves, which agrees, you move on. The environment variable now contains a literal tilde character, though, and that is the thing every child process inherits.

Disconnect3d described the problem and framed it as a quoted tilde not being expanded. I reproduced it, and the Bash result is more interesting than “it doesn’t work”: in Bash it does work, which is exactly why the bug survives.

Shell on Kuldeep Pisda

A Quoted ~ in PATH Works in Bash and Silently Becomes a Relative Path Everywhere Else