The ~jal expansion is performed by the shell (bash/csh/whatever), not by the system itself, so your program is trying to look into the folder named ~jal/, not /home/jal/.

I'm not a C coder, but getpwent() may be what you need.

Opening a file on unix using c++
Fancy tree 

What we want is to disable the checkboxes based on custom classes that we add. 

For e.g.:

renderNode: function(event, data) {

    if(!data.node.folder) {
        $(data.node.span).addClass("custom-class");
    }

    $(".custom-class").css({ // css to disable checkbox});

}

