On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Lynn David Newton wrote:

> I've known for years that one can't do tilde expansion
> with a variable name, e.g.,
> 
>   WHO=joeuser
>   cd ~$WHO
>
> doesn't work, but I have never quite grokked exactly
> why, or whether there is a workaround.
>

$ is my prompt.  Only executed with bash.
The following command-lines were tried.  

   $ echo $SHELL
   /bin/bash

   $ WHO=root

   $ eval cd ~$WHO
   bash: cd: /root: Permission denied

Potential solution?

>From your code...

    cp $files ~$u

switch to

   eval cp $files ~$u

Thurman