On 7 Mar 2003, at 20:02, Diane Kroeckel wrote:

> What is the ~ called, and why would I see it in an internet address?
>
> thanks.
>
> Lewis Russakov

Hi Diane (or Lewis):

  The tilde ("~") is the highest-value printable character in the standard
(7-bit) ASCII character set.

  While most of us on this list use small single-user machines, there's a
whole other world out there on the Internet of fairly large servers -- or
clusters of servers -- which are shared by many users.
  On many of these systems, there is a convention that "~username" in a
directory path refers to the "home directory" for account "username",
without explicitly stating which storage system or device the directory
resides on.  (In a large installation, it may be that no single drive, or
even server, is large enough to hold ALL of the user account home
directories -- which may sometimes need to be moved from one place to
another.)

  So you will often see URLs of the form:

http://www.bigdomain.tld/~fflintstone/wilmapics

pointing to the "wilmapics" folder under fflintstone's account on the web
server (or server cluster) at bigdomain.tld.

David Gillett

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