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Comment by dusted | Hacker News Reader

The "tilde" part of the name comes from the ~ character, traditionally used to indicate a users public HTML directory.

For instance, if you were a user "dannyboy" on example.com you might host a website in /home/dannyboy/public_html and it'd be exposed via example.com/~dannoyboy

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Origins of Tilde Club: https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...

Similarly used by https://tildes.net (invites available if you email me).

and unix shell expansion before that

As they say, $HOME is where the tilde is.

And it came to Unix because "HOME" was printed on the tilde key of the ADM3A terminal.

i did not know this! so what was more influential, adm3a or vt100?

oh yes, of course, I used to type cd ~ instead of just cd. Totally forgot that

My top 2 aliases (after ll):

    alias ~="cd ~"
    alias ..="cd .."

As of bash 4, `shopt -s autocd` will automatically do that (and more).

TIL - thanks!

  cd ~dusted

is the lesser-known expansion

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