Context

This involves ZSH wavy expansion (e.g. in bash tilde expansion).

Example: ~http is extended to /srv/http, which is (roughly) the home page of the user http set in /etc/ password.

What I want to do

I

want to configure ZSH to get any filename squiggly extension I wish.

This is similar to setting alias ~foo/foo/bar in my .zshrc.

What I don’t want

I could create (as root) the user foo and set its home page to /foo/bar, but since any user should be able to do this, such a solution would be Not acceptable.

Also, this has nothing to do with the completion of ~ to $HOME.

Miscellaneous

This article discusses the nature of the bash wavy line extension: Meaning of tilde in Linux bash (not home directory) .

Thanks for the answer! 😉

You can use one (or both) of these:

• hash -d foo=/foo/bar ( hash builtin command )
• foo=/foo/bar/

Now, we can also change the current directory to /foo/bar using cd ~foo.

It is called “Static named directories” in zsh.

Note: When > CDABLE_VARS shell option is an event if the directory (/foo/bar in this example, we can even do cd foo instead of cd ~foo in the above example) exists.