Tilde expansions

An unquoted tilde character (~) at the beginning of a word is expanded according to the following rules:

• ~ expands to the value of the HOME variable (the current user's home directory).
• ~user expands to the home directory of the specified user. All the characters up to a slash (/) or the end of the word are treated as a user name.
• ~+ expands to the value of the PWD (working directory) variable.
• ~- expands to the value of the OLDPWD (previous working directory) variable if it is set.

Examples

1. Change the current directory to the user's home directory:

   cd ~
   

2. Change the current directory to the bin directory in user smith's home directory:

   cd ~smith/bin