[Bug] tilde ~ in override value will not work

🐛 Bug

Description

tilde (~) at the beginning of the value results in hydra.errors.OverrideParseException

Checklist

• I checked on the latest version of Hydra
• I created a minimal repro (See this for tips).

To reproduce

** Minimal Code/Config snippet to reproduce **

python main.py hydra.run.dir=~/outputs

** Stack trace/error message **

LexerNoViableAltException: hydra.run.dir=~/outputs
                                         ^
See https://hydra.cc/docs/next/advanced/override_grammar/basic for details

Set the environment variable HYDRA_FULL_ERROR=1 for a complete stack trace.

Expected Behavior

work without error.

System information

• Hydra Version : 1.0.6
• Python version : 3.6
• Virtual environment type and version : pyenv 1.2.21
• Operating system : linux ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS

Additional context

None.

[omry]

If you are expecting hydra.run.dir=~/outputs to expand to your home directory, this is a function of the shell. You can try to echo it and see if your shell does it or not:

$ echo hydra.run.dir=~/outputs
hydra.run.dir=~/outputs
~ $ echo ~/outputs
/Users/omry/outputs

As you can see, my shell (bash) is not expanding ~ in the middle of a string. This has nothing to do with Hydra.

The reason you are getting an error from Hydra is that ~ is a special character for Hydra as well and it can’t appear in an unquoted string. Since both Hydra and your shell will intercept quotes, you need to quote twice:

$ python my_app.py 'hydra.run.dir="~/outputs"'

However, because ~ is not expanded by the shell the output directory created will actually contain the ~ character.

[dave-epstein]

Alright. I used value interpolation as a cumbersome workaround.