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What does the ~ mean in an absolute file path?

I see this in the output of things like build scripts but the path does not exist.

Jens Erat
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blade34r
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6 Answers6

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Normally it means the user's home directory e.g. ~mike/ would be the user mike's home directory, ~/ would be your own home directory. However, it is unclear to me whether ~/ and ~mike/ should be considered absolute or relative; it seems to depend on the definition given (if anyone can come up with an authorative reference, please post a comment).

Note that I'm talking about Unix based systems here.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_directory#Unix

Adrian Mouat
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Actually, both of the answers by Adrian Mouat and studiohack are true.
In operating systems with limited naming convention (Older version of Windows/DOS etc') it signifies a long name. 

e.g. "c:\program files\" is equivalent to "c:\progra~1\"

In some operating systems (namely Unix) it means home-dir (and might be seen as an absolute but not canonical path).
e.g."/a/vol01/usr/mike/" might be shortened to "~/mike/"
* where 'usr' is the home dir.

Eran
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On many file systems, a file name will contain a tilde (~) within each component of the name that is too long to comply with 8.3 naming rules.

Source: Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces - Short vs. Long Names - MSDN

(Part-way down the page...)

studiohack
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And if you do ASP.NET programming it means the top level of the website; rather than navigating using ../../images/some_image.jpg (and getting your nesting level wrong!) you can simply say ~/images/some_image.jpg

noonand
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More about Windows:

  1. If hidden file name starts with '~' then Windows Explorer process it as system hidden file. More info in Why are hidden files with a leading tilde treated as super-hidden?

  2. If short file/directory name contains '~' (like "c:\ololoo~1") it is possible for corresponding long name of this file/directory to exceed maximum length (MAX_PATH=260). Developers should workarond this with "\\?\" prefix (even on newer Windows 10 as user can disable ">260"-long paths support with LongPathsEnabled registry parameter or with "Enable NTFS long paths" group policy). Example for this workaround using C# can be found in ZetaLongPaths library sources.

oshatrk
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Here is a couple of hints that can help you to figure it out better:

$ readlink -f ~

$ echo $HOME

Note: $ is a convention to specify the user command line prompt, it is not a part of the commands.

vtest
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