tilde
<character> "~" ASCII character 126.
Common names are: ITU-T: tilde; squiggle; twiddle; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung dash; enyay; INTERCAL: sqiggle (sic).
Used as C's prefix bitwise negation operator; and in Unix csh, GNU Emacs, and elsewhere, to stand for the current user's home directory, or, when prefixed to a login name, for the given user's home directory.
The "swung dash" or "approximation" sign is not quite the same as tilde in typeset material but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare angle brackets).
History of the tilde. So where does this leave us? Unsatisfied, no doubt. There is history here, but there are gaps. What happened at that watershed meeting in 1966? How did the tilde rise to prominence in the 1980s? When did it become a synonym for home directory? When did it migrate into the world of web servers to provide a cheap and simple way of giving individual users their own web sites? I dont know, and the lateness of the hour prevents me from continuing my research, a failing for which I apologize profusely. Goodnight, goodnight. May you dream of tildes, stars, and whorls. [ dive into mark]
12:38:52 PM 
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