Leading tilde (~) characters in physical pathname namestrings are expanded in the way that most shells do:

"~user/..." can be used to refer to an absolute pathname rooted at the home directory of the user named "user".

"~/..." can be used to refer to an absolute pathname rooted at the home directory of the current user.

Clozure CL sets up logical pathname translations for logical hosts: ccl and home

The CCL logical host should point to the ccl directory. It is used for a variety of purposes by Clozure CL including: locating Clozure CL source code, require and provide, accessing foreign function information, and the Clozure CL build process. It is set to the value of the environment variable CCL_DEFAULT_DIRECTORY, which is set by the openmcl shell script Section 2.3.1, “The ccl Shell Script”. If CCL_DEFAULT_DIRECTORY is not set, then it is set to the directory containing the current heap image.

Clozure CL assumes that pathname strings are decomposed UTF-8.

Pathname strings are treated as null-terminated strings encoded according to the current locale.

Pathname strings are treated as null-terminated strings encoded according to the current locale; a future release may change this convention to use UTF-8.