What directory is '~' when I type 'cd

Question

I'm only new to using SSH, but when I log in I end up in the directory ~, which in general is the same directory when FTPing in. I can still go to /, but I don't know what the ~ means. Home? Where is it in relation to /, or how could I find out?

Answer 1

/ is the root of the file system ~/ or ~ is the root of your profile, ~/ is always /home/username

Answer 2

And home, in relation to /, isn't necessarily always in the same place. That's why the ~ shortcut is so useful. The path to home should be in $HOME. Try typing

echo $HOME

Answer 3

As others have commented, the tilde indicates your current $HOME directory. This may or may not be the same as the value of ~username for your user name. On my machine, $HOME and ~ both refer to /work1/jleffler. However, ~jleffler is a reference to an NFS mounted directory, /u/jleffler, as specified in the /etc/passwd file (or any equivalent database - the POSIX standard defines the behaviour in terms of the getpwnam() function; see below). My profile carefully sets $HOME. It is interesting (aka exasperating) to work out which software packages use the wrong definition of the home directory.

For most people, ~ and ~username are the same for their user name, but that is not required. Given that you are asking the question, it is almost certainly the case that ~ and ~username are the same.

Quote from section 2.6.1 'Tilde Expansion' of POSIX.1-2008:

A "tilde-prefix" consists of an unquoted <tilde> character at the beginning of a word, followed by all of the characters preceding the first unquoted <slash> in the word, or all the characters in the word if there is no <slash>. [...] If the login name is null (that is, the tilde-prefix contains only the tilde), the tilde-prefix is replaced by the value of the variable HOME. If HOME is unset, the results are unspecified. Otherwise, the tilde-prefix shall be replaced by a pathname of the initial working directory associated with the login name obtained using the getpwnam() function [...]. If the system does not recognize the login name, the results are undefined.

Answer 4

~ is your home directory, yes. Which is very nice since your home directory is not always where you think it should be (/home/).

Also, fun fact: You can use "cd ~myuser" to get to the home directory of the user "myuser".

Answer 5

Yes, it is the home directory of the user you logged in as. You can use the command pwd (print working directory) to see where it is located on the file system.