Note:

• ~ expansion for native utilities currently fundamentally only works on Unix platforms - but Windows would benefit from it too: see Resolve file paths before passing to native commands #10675

• Fully emulating the logic of ~ expansion in PowerShell requires recognizing partial quoting of sub-tokens in arguments (e.g., ~/'foo bar'), which may turn out to be a challenge based on how argument parsing currently works.

Steps to reproduce

On a Unix-like platform:

# Quoting the argument as a whole always suppresses ~ expansion.
/bin/echo '~/foo' | Should -Be '~/foo'

# Both commands should expand ~ to the value of $HOME, 
# because the ~/ prefix is unquoted.
/bin/echo ~/foo | Should -Not -BeLike '~/*'
/bin/echo ~/'foo bar' | Should -Not -BeLike '~/*'

Expected behavior

All tests should succeed.

Actual behavior

The 3rd test fails, because the partially quoted argument prevented ~ expansion - even though ~/ is unquoted.

Expected like wildcard '~*' to not match '~/foo bar', but it did match.

Note that in POSIX-like shells - whose behavior here is being emulated - /bin/echo ~/'foo bar' indeed expands ~, as expected.

Environment data

PowerShell Core 7.0.0-rc.1