Prevent expansion of `~` - bash

Question

I have a script which sync's a few files with a remote host. The commands that I want to issue are of the form
rsync -avz ~/.alias user#y:~/.alias
My script looks like this:
files=(~/.alias ~/.vimrc)
for file in "${files[#]}"; do
rsync -avz "${file}" "user#server:${file}"
done
But the ~ always gets expanded and in fact I invoke the command
rsync -avz /home/user/.alias user#server:/home/user/.alias
instead of the one above. But the path to the home directory is not necessarily the same locally as it is on the server. I can use e.g. sed to replace this part, but it get's extremely tedious to do this for several servers with all different paths. Is there a way to use ~ without it getting expanded during the runtime of the script, but still rsync understands that the home directory is meant by ~?

Answer 1

files=(~/.alias ~/.vimrc)
The paths are already expanded at this point. If you don't want that, escape them or quote them.
files=('~/.alias' \~/.vimrc)
Of course, then you can't use them, because you prevented the shell from expanding '~':
~/.alias: No such file or directory
You can expand the tilde later in the command using eval (always try to avoid eval though!) or a simple substitution:
for file in "${files[#]}"; do
rsync -avz "${file/#\~/$HOME/}" "user#server:${file}"
done

Answer 2

You don't need to loop, you can just do:
rsync -avz ~/.alias/* 'user#y:~/.alias/'
EDIT: You can do:
files=(.alias .vimrc)
for file in "${files[#]}"; do
rsync -avz ~/"${file}" 'user#server:~/'"${file}"
done