What/where is the "~" directory?

[Amn]

So my shell tells me i am working in a "~" directory. However, i cannot figure out what it means? Is it an alias of some place in directory tree?

[tpl]

in bash, "~" is short for your home directory: so if you say "cd ~"
you'll be changed over to there. Handy

[Amn]

Thanks. I figure its an working alias for wherever home directory is, in case its not the default /home/<userid>, right ?

[Freston]

That's one way to put it.

A command such as <cd ~other_user> brings you to the home dir of other_user (provided you have permision.

By the way, a bare <cd> brings you to your own home dir

[Cabhan]

Let's be a little clearer.

~user refers to that user's home directory. In addition to this being a much shorter way of accessing a home directory, you are correct in that it refers to the home directory wherever it exists, because they do not have to be under /home. The most obvious example is ~root, which would point to /root, but a user's home directory may be anywhere on the system.

A simple '~' is an alias for your own home directory, which is very convenient. This allows me to give some advice in the form of (for instance, modifying their .xinitrc file): "Modify your ~/.xinitrc file", and I don't need to put in placeholders or generic names. Very nice.

This also has a cool effect of letting you look up home directories easily, instead of having to search through /etc/passwd. I can just run:

echo ~ => /home/alex
echo ~root => /root

This is because Bash actually does the replacement here. When you say "cd ..", the program 'cd' receives a literal '..' and has to know what it means. But when you say "cd ~", Bash replaces the '~', so the program actually receives "/home/user". This means that ~ will work in EVERY program where paths are given as parameters.

[dr_te_z]

if you say "cd ~" you'll be changed over to there. Handy

Yes, and "cd -" will bring you back to your previous directory.

[bigtomrodney]

Speaking of which you can use pushd and popd to change to a completely different location and pop back to it. You can do this several times creating a 'deck'. Every time you run popd you go back one layer.