chdir() to home directory

Question

I am using the chdir() C function to allow a user to change directory.

The function however, doesn't recognize '~'. Do I need to do any explicit conversion, so chdir doesn't recognize what ~ means? Because mine isn't working. Or am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

Tilde expansion is handled by the shell, not by a system call. You could use getenv() to read the environment variable HOME and then use that as the argument to chdir().

There are system calls to get this information that may be more reliable on an individual system, but they're not completely portable. Look, for example, at getpwuid().