It's normal, actually.  "~" is only understood by the shell, so unless the shell is invoked to expand it a program will fail to understand it.  Additionally, some shells only expand "~" at the beginning of a "word", so if you `export PATH=~/foo:~/bar' the second "~" won't be expanded.  (bash will expand it after a colon, so that should work.)  If you quote the string, "~" won't be expanded (`export PATH="~/foo"' won't expand the "~").

A way to check this:  type `env PATH'.  If the result contains a "~", you need to look at how you're setting PATH to make sure "~" isn't being quoted.

-- 

brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com

system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu

electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH