Prevent expansion of `~`

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0

I have a script which sync's a few files with a remote host. The commands that I want to issue are of the form

rsync -avz ~/.alias user@y:~/.alias

My script looks like this:

files=(~/.alias)

for file in "${files[@]}"; do
    rsync -avz "${file}" "user@server:${file}"
done

But the ~ always gets expanded and in fact I invoke the command

rsync -avz /home/user/.alias user@server:/home/user/.alias

instead of the one above. But the path to the home directory is not necessarily the same locally as it is on the server. I can use e.g. sed to replace this part, but it get's extremely tedious to do this for several servers with all different paths. Is there a way to use ~ without it getting expanded during the runtime of the script, but still rsync understands that the home directory is meant by ~?

asked 32 secs ago

pfnuesel

3,148

Prevent expansion of `~`