Put this in local.conf: DL_DIR="~/my-yocto-downloads" $ bitbake <whatever> Witness all kinds of downloads errors and downloaded files in various wrong locations.
~ is a shell expansion and bitbake doesn't expand in the same way as the shell does. Supporting this would turn into a nightmare as you'd have to know which variables were considered "paths" and there is no such markup, we'd have to guess. You can guarantee that if we did try, we'd get it wrong (e.g. ~ can also be used in version strings). So I really can't see any way to support this, sorry.