More helpful error message with open(~/path/to/file.txt)

[haakon-e]

I encountered the issue of not being able to use ~ to refer to my homedir on unix when (indirectly) calling open(~/path/to/file.txt) in the YAML.jl package: JuliaData/YAML.jl#137

Though it seems the issue won't be "fixed", I'm very happy to see that on julia +nightly, cd("~/Documents") now provides a very helpful error message (I wasn't able to find a reference to the PR that fixed this):

julia> cd("~/Documents")
ERROR: IOError: cd("~/Documents"): no such file or directory (ENOENT)
Many shells expand '~' to the home directory in unquoted strings. To replicate this behavior, call `expanduser` to expand the '~' character to the user’s home directory.

is there any chance this could be adopted in other IO methods, such as open (and others as applicable)? Now, it only says:

julia> open("~/Documents/file.txt", "r")
ERROR: SystemError: opening file "~/Documents/file.txt": No such file or directory
Stacktrace:
[...]

ref:

          The suggestion has been added to the error message printing for `~` and the cmd parser has its own issue for adding support for more special characters

Originally posted by vtjnash in #1136 (comment)

edit: apologies, didn't know it would @/vtjnash

[giordano]

I wasn't able to find a reference to the PR that fixed this

Search "Many shells expand", end up at

julia/base/libuv.jl

Line 88 in be3bc9a

print(io, "\nMany shells expand '~' to the home directory in unquoted strings. To replicate this behavior, call",

then click on the "blame" button to discover that that line was introduced by #22647.

is there any chance this could be adopted in other IO methods

I'm sure chances are much higher if someone interested in this problem opens a PR 🙂

[haakon-e]

Thanks Mosè. I parse from what's not explicitly said in your response that you wouldn't be opposed to this proposed change -- which I find motivating for finding the time to make a PR 🙂

[jishnub]

Please do, we could do with more error hints