tilde

tilde

(1) In mathematics, the tilde symbol (~) stands for equivalence; for example, a ~ b means "a is equivalent to b" (not equal, but comparable). It also stands for approximation. Officially written as two tildes, one over the other, the single tilde has become acceptable; for example, ~100 means "approximately 100."

(2) In the Unix world, the popular Unix shells, except for the Bourne shell, support a home directory name substitution using the tilde symbol (~). Also called a "squiggle" or "twiddle," the symbol is used as a prefix to a user login name to specify that user's home directory. For example, if your username were "jackson," you would use ~jackson to refer to your home directory. See shell and home directory.

(3) In Windows 95/98, the ~ symbol is used to maintain a short version of a long file or folder name for compatibility with Windows 3.1 and DOS. For example, the short version of a file named "Letter to Joe" would be LETTER~1. Then "Letter to Pat" becomes LETTER~2. See Win Short file names.

(4) The tilde symbol (~) is a Spanish accent that turns the letter "n" into a "nyeh" sound such as in the word mañana, which is pronounced "mah-nyah-nah" and means "tomorrow" and "morning." In fact, tomorrow morning is "mañana por la mañana."

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(character)

tilde - "~" ASCII character 126. Common names are: ITU-T: tilde; squiggle; twiddle; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung dash; enyay; INTERCAL: sqiggle (sic). Used as C's prefix bitwise negation operator; and in Unix csh, GNU Emacs, and elsewhere, to stand for the current user's home directory, or, when prefixed to a login name, for the given user's home directory. The "swung dash" or "approximation" sign is not quite the same as tilde in typeset material but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare angle brackets).