Linux – FTP commands from BASH. what does ~ do

bashftplinux

I was trying to delete multiple files from FTP using Bash.

Then I found my answer here with using the prompt command.

But I want to know what the tilde ~ does in:

ftp nobody@ftp.example.com
cd my_local_directory
prompt
mdelete *.txt~

I found this site which says that:

With some ftp servers, the "tilde" character, or ~ is used preceeding a username to bypass the need to specify the full path to the user's directory. For example,

my_university.edu/users/bob/welcome.html

might also be reached by specifying:

my_university.edu/~bob/welcome.html

But that's relevant to this use case.

Best Answer

The ~ character has no special meaning in FTP, and in your example it is simply part of the file name.

Several text editors (including gedit) append ~ to the name of a file when it is updated, so the ~ copy becomes the previous version. Other text editors have different back-up naming schemes.

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