tilde

A symbol used in Windows, starting with Windows 95, that maintains a short version of a long file or directory 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.

In the Unix world, all the popular Unix shells (except for the Bourne shell) support a home directory name substitution using the tilde. 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 user name were "jackson," you would use ~jackson to refer to your home directory.

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 "morning" or "tomorrow." The tilde is also used as a mathematical symbol that means the difference between two values or an equivalency between two values. See home directory and Win Short file names.

---

(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).