Does anyone know the origin of using "~" to represent the user's home directory?
 

This has been a question I've been wanting to ask. Recently, it came to my attention that I've known that "~" represents the user's home directory in BASH for many years, but I haven't a clue why.

I've done a little google-ing too and couldn't come up with anything either.

Any uber-geeks out there have an answer?

Bearing in mind that Linux is a Unix variant, it probably comes from Unix.


Couldn't find anything on why that is the way it is though.

Me neither, only thing I know is it's a shell-specific thingie to do brace/tilde/dollarsign expansion.

This is the best I can do:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/200...the_tilde.html

Cool moses, thanks for the link. Wish there was a definitive answer, but like Mick Jagger said, you can't always get what you want.

but if you try some times, you just might find, that you get what you need.

The tilde is meaningless in the bourne shell on an IBM EXL server.