If we wanted to change to our home directory, we could type:

$ cd

With no arguments, cd will change to your home directory, which is /root for the superuser and typically /home/username for a regular user. But what if we want to specify a file in our home directory? Maybe we want to pass a file argument to the myprog command. If the file lives in our home directory, we can type:

$ ./myprog /home/drobbins/myfile.txt

However, using an absolute path like that isn't always convenient. Thankfully, we can use the ~ (tilde) character to do the same thing:

$ ./myprog ~/myfile.txt