Oddity may be in the eye of the beholder. I've been programming and scripting for about 40 years, including several *IX shells and many other systems. I'm relatively new to Python. Mostly the results of doing things in Python are what I expect. Not doing expansion of a leading tilde when I ask for an absolute path is not what I expect. So to me it's odd. Or different. Or just not what I expect. Substitute "unexpected" for "odd" if you like. Sure, tilde expansion wasn't part of the Bourne shell, but it's been in POSIX shells for about the same amount of time that Python has been around, so it's odd to me that Python differs in this way. It's not hard to work around now that I know about it.