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I am attempting to create a script that shows how much memory every user on the system is using in their home directory. Everything was going smooth till I started using the du -sh command to start pulling information about specific users. I attempt to run:

du -sh ~currentUser
enter code here

I understand how the command works in command line. How do I get it to work while using a variable username? Below reguser is dummy account I have on my system I use to screw around with.

:/home/reguser/Documents# du -sh ~reguser

Gives output of

71M /home/reguser

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  • I was able to use du "/home/$currentUser". But why can't i use the ~ to reference the home Dir in the command? Commented Jun 21, 2022 at 2:31
  • Don't add comments to your own question, use the EDIT button to add information and improve your question. Commented Jun 21, 2022 at 3:33
  • Since when does ~ expands to /home/? It's supposed to expand to the current value of the HOME env var. Commented Jun 23, 2022 at 0:50
  • @TomYan ~ alone expands to $HOME but ~username expands to homedir of that user from getpwnam (equivalent to getent passwd, as in glenn's answer) and nowadays distros usually default user homedirs to /home/$user Commented Jun 23, 2022 at 2:53

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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It's because, in the order of Shell Expansions, tilde expansion occurs before variable expansion.

Instead of assuming "/home" you can use

getent passwd $user | cut -d: -f6
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