On 19. juli. 2008, at 03:04, Matthew Boeh wrote:
> A better fix to match the Bourne shell behavior would be to get rid
> of the "user %s doesn't exist" exception entirely and leave the
> string unchanged.

I somewhat agree. Python also does this the same way as Bash [1]:

 >>> os.path.expanduser("~rune")
'/Users/rune'
 >>> os.path.expanduser("~asdf")
'~asdf'

However; according to the ri documentation, File.expand_path returns
an absolute path, so we should probably return CWD + argument, and
not just an unaltered argument:

i.e.:
$ cd /usr/local; ruby -e 'p File.expand_path("~asdf")'
"/usr/local/~asdf"

[1]: See also the section ŵilde Expansionin the Bash man page.

-- 
Best regards
Rune Hammersland