cd ~ works in one terminal session but not another (no error reported)

Question

I have two PuTTy sessions open to the same host. One one cd ~ gets me back to my home dir fine and on another one it doesn't -- stays in the same dir.

I have never seen something like this happen.

Any idea why this might be happening?

OS: SunOS 5.10

what shell are you using? Also, dump both environments, ie set > env_goodwindow ; set > env_badwindowand diff them. Same forstty` settings. Good luck. — shellter, Oct 05 '12 at 19:15
BTW, cd alone takes you to your home directory. No need for the ~ — Stéphane Chazelas, Oct 05 '12 at 20:24
Does this always happen each time you open two ssh connections to the host, or did it happen just once? — , Oct 06 '12 at 01:38

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 06 '12 at 03:14

It sounds like you've changed or unset your $HOME environment variable in one of the ssh sessions.

$HOME is the default arg for the cd built-in, at least for all the sh-like shells that I have installed on my system (incl. dash, bash, ksh, and zsh).

They all have something like this in their man page (from dash):

 HOME   The home directory of the current user; the default argument for
        the cd builtin command.  The value of this variable is also used
        when performing tilde expansion.

csh and tcsh use $home (lowercase). – cas Oct 06 '12 at 03:19 — cas, Oct 06 '12 at 03:19

cd ~ works in one terminal session but not another (no error reported)

1 Answers1