@admitsWrongIfProven yeah, that's what i did initially, was surprised to see the ~ left alone. it's a bit annoying, it's a cli, when a user types --dump-dir ~/whatever the shell fixes it by --dump-dir=~/whatever and the tilde stays. oh well. i did it manually, substituting the system property (but rather than using string manipulation, calling homeDir.resolve(...) on a path that truncates the given path through the tilde plus file separator)