Comment by alexpotato

Not necessarily about tildes but about some of the craziness that can happen with bash at large orgs:

At a past job, I was trying to figure out what part of my basrhc was setting a particular environment variable. I assumed that it must be some kind of default installed in my user profile and/or inheriting from /etc/<something>.

I realized pretty quickly that my bashrc was importing some other files. Again, the assumption was that this would be one file deep in the import.

It turned out there were 10+ layers of import starting from an "ur-bashrc" and then layer upon layer of more and more imports to finally get to a user level profile.

It was so convoluted that I was going nuts until I found this Stack Exchange post: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/813/how-to-determin...

It turns on "tracing" for bash imports so that you can then narrow down on where the env variable is getting set.