Location of the user’s home directory

$HOME contains the path of the current user’s home directory. It’s used in tilde expansion.

Links

• Bash manual
• POSIX specification

Examples

Output the path to the current user’s home directory.

1

echo "$HOME"

Tilde expansion for the current user

1

echo ~

Tilde expansion for another user

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echo ~jane

Output the path to the home directory of user “jane”. If the user does not exist, then the output depends on your shell’s implementation.