$HOME  –  Location of the user’s home directory

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

$HOME is also used as the default argument for the cd command.

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

1	echo ~jane