Hi Gerd,
to be precise: I tested with ubuntu default shell.
java -jar mkgmap.jar ~/xyz.osm.pbf works java -jar mkgmap.jar --bounds=~/bounds_20121118.zip xyz.osm gives file not found error for the bounds file
That would probably be the Bourne again shell (bash), which is the default interactive shell in Debian. It will expand ~ at the start of an argument, but not in the middle. man 1 bash says:
Tilde Expansion If a word begins with an unquoted tilde character (`~'), all of the characters preceding the first unquoted slash (or all characters, if there is no unquoted slash) are considered a tilde-prefix.
Note the 'begins with'. IMO the simplest solution would be to accept this syntax if it is not accepted yet: java -jar mkgmap.jar --bounds ~/bounds_20121118.zip xyz.osm Then, the ~ would begin a word, and the shell would expand it. A workaround is to write java -jar mkgmap.jar --bounds="$HOME"/bounds_20121118.zip xyz.osm (I usually use "" around variables in shell scripts, in case the variable value contains $IFS characters, such as spaces. I guess that defining HOME='/home/j. random user' could break some badly written scripts.) Marko