os.makedirs doesn't understand "~" in my path

Question:

I have a little problem with ~ in my paths.

This code example creates some directories called ~/some_dir and do not understand that I wanted to create some_dir in my home directory.

my_dir = "~/some_dir"
if not os.path.exists(my_dir):
    os.makedirs(my_dir)

Note this is on a Linux-based system.

Asked By: Johan

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Answers:

You need to expand the tilde manually:

my_dir = os.path.expanduser('~/some_dir')
Answered By: SilentGhost

That’s probably because Python is not Bash and doesn’t follow same conventions. You may use this:

homedir = os.path.expanduser('~')
Answered By: gruszczy

The conversion of ~/some_dir to $HOME/some_dir is called tilde expansion and is a common user interface feature. The file system does not know anything about it.

In Python, this feature is implemented by os.path.expanduser:

my_dir = os.path.expanduser("~/some_dir")
Answered By: ddaa
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