Get user home directory in Matlab on Windows
The tilde “~” character is used by most terminal shells as shorthand for the user home directory.
The home directory is typically a safer place to write files than the system root directory, so ~ give a convenient way to refer to an absolute path generic across systems.
Many code languages require parsing the tilde, including Python, C++, Fortran and Matlab.
GNU Octave understands that ~
tilde is the user’s home directory on any operating system, even Windows.
Matlab does not consistently understand ~
as the user home directory, particularly on Windows.
To fix this issue, we created expanduser.m that works on Linux, Mac and Windows.
expanduser('~')
returns the absolute path of the user home directory, for example:
- Linux:
/home/username
- MacOS:
/Users/username
- Windows:
C:\Users\Username