Can you please explain what this is supposed to do? I don't understand from your description. Also, maybe it's just me but, I really have an aversion to things that only work on one platform. At a minimum, one would think things like this would work on MacOS.

I'm trying to make '~user' expand to the home path for the user in question... except it doesn't seem to be working at the moment. I'm not very experienced at this.

It should be working for MacOS without many changes, and I also hope to get it working for Windows soon.

The ~user home completion is indeed missing and it would be a good addition, thanks for working on it!

Your code has a lot of unwraps and expects which are problematic in a shell which is supposed to never panic. It would be great if you could eliminate them. To me, it seems like in most cases you could work directly with Paths, or convert path.to_str() once beforehand and skip the ~user expansion if it fails.

Also, ideally, it should be cross-platform since we do not want Nushell to behave differently on different OSes.

Yeah, I think this could be handy.

I was thinking - for crossplatform logic could we use the home path and then substitute the user's name for what is given after the ~? It'd be crossplatform and wouldn't pull in the additional dependency.

@jntrnr Yeah, I was thinking the same but on Linux the root user has a different home path than /home/root. But maybe it's good enough or at least good enough on Windows.

How is this supposed to work?

I have 2 users on my Mac.

> ls /Users 
╭───┬────────────────┬──────┬───────┬────────────────╮
│ # │      name      │ type │ size  │    modified    │
├───┼────────────────┼──────┼───────┼────────────────┤
│ 0 │ /Users/Shared  │ dir  │   384 │ 3 days ago     │
│ 1 │ /Users/fdncred │ dir  │ 1,408 │ 35 minutes ago │
├───┼────────────────┼──────┼───────┼────────────────┤
│ # │      name      │ type │ size  │    modified    │
╰───┴────────────────┴──────┴───────┴────────────────╯

Am I supposed to be able to do ls ~/Shared or ls ~Shared or what? Also, is it supposed to work with tab completions? I'm so confused. LOL

ls ~Shared should be correct. Whenever ~user is used (say in a filepath such as ~user/foo/bar/txt.txt) it should automatically expand to the user's home dir. (In this case, /home/user/foo/bar/txt.txt or /Users/user/foo/bar/txt.txt or some equivalent.) I don't think it works with tab completions.

ok, thanks for the clarification. i couldn't get ls ~Shared to work on my mac this morning.

@fdncred - previously the function wasn't being called at all because ~user formats were being declined by the check if !path.starts_with("~"). ls ~user is working now for me.

I still can't get this to work on Mac.

It's probably true that there is no password for the Shared user. I'm just thinking that there's probably a better way to handle this than panicking and exiting nushell.

Changing this PR to draft until it's figured out.

Ahhhh, that is a problem I had not considered. I should probably match the error to just return /Users/username for MacOS.

ya, maybe instead of looking in the passwd file to get the home dir, maybe there's a better way to do it using a cross platform crate.

@merelymyself Instead of panicking, you can just return the un-expanded path.

@kubouch @fdncred thanks for the feedback! There's no chance of panicking now, I replaced all the .expect()s with options that wouldn't panic.

Seems like this is working now. Let's see if anything breaks. Thanks!