Command-Line – What Does `~/` Mean in Filesystem?

command linefilesystem

I'm new to Linux and Ubuntu. People keep using ~/filename in their answers to my questions. What does ~/ mean?

Best Answer

~/ is shorthand for the current user's home folder. So if your user name is "foobar" it expands to /home/foobar/

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – What does the ‘tail’ command do

I'd suggest you take a look at the man page of tail. Just run man tail in your shell, or check it online.

Print the last 10 lines of each FILE to standard output. With more than one FILE, precede each with a header giving the file name. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

-f, --follow[={name|descriptor}]
output appended data as the file grows; -f, --follow, and --fol- low=descriptor are equivalent

And if you don't know what's man, you can always type man man ;)

PATH Variable – What Does $PATH Mean?

Run in a terminal:

echo $PATH

printf "%s\n" "$PATH"

what you see is a list of directories, looking like:

/home/jacob/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games

If you put an executable in either one of these directories, you do not need to set the path to the executable / script, but you can run it by its name as a command.

Executables in $PATH should not have a language extension by convention (although they would work)

Editing your $PATH variable

You can (permanently) add a directory to $PATH by adding the following line to your ~/.profile file (invisible by default, press Ctrl+H in the file manager to make it visible):

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/dir

More usefull information on environment variables

(such as $PATH) can be found here (thanks for the suggestions @Letizia)