$USER is not resolved in paths sometimes

[Achim Gratz]

Thomas Deinhamer writes:
> I'm running Cygwin and using the zsh shell.
>
> In the .zshrc file I got these lines:
> alias vboxmanage=VBoxManage
> vboxmanage setproperty machinefolder "C:\Users\$USER\VirtualBox VMs\"

You really should not use DOS paths, but if you do you should know when
they will be expanded by the shell and how often, in which case you need
to escape the backslashes accordingly.

> When I try to boot a VM using vagrant (which
> uses vboxmanage internally I think) sometimes
> $USER is not resolved to the real username.
>
> Instead vboxmanage creates a new machinefolder
> on C:/ which is then called "Users$USER" and
> inside this folder there is the folder "VirtualBox VMs",
> so the wrong path is "C:\Users$USER\VirtualBox VMs\".

No, that's exactly what you told it to create, "\$" means "insert a
literal "$".

> How could that be? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I don't see how the example you gave can work correctly, not even
sometimes, unless vboxmanage does interpret $USER itself (or expands its
arguments using a shell or something like that).  Which is exactly why
you shouldn't use this sort of path in the first place, since how much
escaping needs to be done depends on how many evaluations the string
goes through.


Regards,
Achim.
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