why is there a copy of user home dir showing up in root?

Question

I noticed today there is a directory called '~amir` in /. This seems really odd. The same directory is in my /home directory as amir is my username. They directories contain exactly the same data!

Does anyone know how/why this happened and how I remove the one in root? Executing 'rm ~amir" will remove my home folder won't it?

Here is the output from ls with the offending item being the first directory shown:

root@superMassive:/# ls -al
total 96
drwxr-xr-x  25 root root  4096 2012-03-06 03:00 .
drwxr-xr-x  25 root root  4096 2012-03-06 03:00 ..
drwxr-xr-t   3 root root  4096 2012-03-02 02:10 ~amir
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 2012-02-27 06:51 bin
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root  4096 2012-02-27 06:52 boot
drwxr-xr-x  17 root root  4440 2012-03-06 08:33 dev
drwxr-xr-x 101 root root  4096 2012-03-06 08:33 etc
drwxr-xr-x   4 root root  4096 2012-03-06 09:04 home

And here is the output to mount as requested:

root@superMassive:/# mount
/dev/sda1 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755)
none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880)
none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
/dev/md0 on /massiveData type ext4 (rw)
rpc_pipefs on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
nfsd on /proc/fs/nfsd type nfsd (rw)

Answer 1

I think I must have created this directory by accident when setting up minidlna. I realised that the contents of this directory were in fact not the same as the home directory. When I was comparing them I was actually entering the home directory not the one at root level. I realised when I used the pwd command to see where I was.

In the end I was able to specify the directory at root level by prepending a / - so rm -R /~amir deleted the copy at root level rather than the one in home.

Sorry to have wasted your time.