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I'm a web application development noob. I have a function that opens a file and reads it. Unfortunately, the directory structures between the test and production servers differ. I was told to "use a path relative to ~". I haven't been able to find any resources on the '~', though!

How do I use the tilde character in the context of paths?

EDIT: This is in Python. I fixed the problem, using os.path.expanduser().

+1  A: 

it is your $HOME var in UNIX, which usually is /home/username.

"Your home" meaning the home of the user who's executing a command like cd ~/MyDocuments/ is cd /home/user_executing_cd_commnd/MyDocuments

dierre
`~` points to your `$HOME`, which can be any directory (i.e., not necessarily `/home/username`).
Håvard S
edited. Thanks for poiniting that out.
dierre
+1  A: 

Unless you're writing a shell script or using some other language that knows to substitute the value of $HOME for ~, tildes in file paths have no special meaning and will be treated as any other non-special character.

If you are writing a shell script, shells don't interpret tildes unless they occur as the first character in an argument. In other words, ~/file will become /path/to/users/home/directory/file, but ./~/file will be interpreted literally (i.e., "a file called file in a subdirectory of . called ~").

Used in URLs, interpretation of the tilde as a shorthand for a user's home directory (e.g., http://www.foo.org/~bob) is a convention borrowed from Unix. Implementation is entirely server-specific, so you'd need to check the documentation for your web server to see if it has any special meaning.

Blrfl