File name followed by a tilde ~

malikah · 02-17-2009, 04:00 PM

Just wondering what a file name followed by a tilde means?

Example:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 1 2009-02-17 15:23 myFile~

repo · 02-17-2009, 04:06 PM

this are backupfiles, created by some editors

i92guboj · 02-17-2009, 04:10 PM

Nothing special really. It depends on the application that created it, it has no special meaning for linux in this context. I think that some text editors use that suffix to save backups of the files you edit.

However, when it's on the beginning of a path or a file name, ~ is usually expanded to the contents of $HOME (so, cd ~/bin is the same that cd $HOME/bin).