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

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

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And if you want to refer to another user home directory you can use ~user, as in ls -l ~enzotib/Documents/. – enzotib Dec 4 '11 at 20:05
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Actually, ~ is the shorthand for current user's home folder :) – heartsmagic Dec 4 '11 at 20:17
@heartsmagic True, but ~/ is equally valid. – WarriorIng64 Dec 4 '11 at 20:40
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I did not say invalid :) Generally we see ~ instead of ~/, since / is not necessary there. – heartsmagic Dec 4 '11 at 20:47
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This is only usually correct, but not technically correct. ~ actually expands to the value of the environment variable HOME. If you change the value of HOME, ~ will also no longer point to that user's home directory. – kojiro Dec 5 '11 at 2:41
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In general the tilde ~ represents your home folder. Use it to refer to your home directory at the command line.

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