I got another geeky shirt for myself. It has no picture. Just text reading “There’s no place like ~/”

For non-Unix folks, the tilde symbol, “~”, is used by Unix command prompts to represent your home folder. If you had a file in your home folder called myfile.txt, you could refer to it as ~/myfile.txt. This saves you from having to type an extra dozen or so characters and unix folks are nothing if not lazy.

Last Sunday, we all came to a war room for a complicated project with a bunch of Unix admins. I wore my geeky shirt figuring that at least this audience would get the joke.

“What’s the wiggly thing?”

At least my boss and teammate figured it out. The teammate pointed out “It’s pretty easy to figure out from the context that ~/ means home.”