What is the button ~ used for on the keyboard?

Question

The keyboard is an American keyboard without letters from any other languages. The button is above the "tab" button and is ` when it is not capitalized. ~~~

Answer 1

it's called tilde and is used in Spanish for the letter "ñ" and for some reason in path names, especially in the age old DOS 8.3 notation (8.3 means 8 characters for the name and 3 characters for the extension).

the following example will show you how it's used:
in XP notation the long directory name "Documents and Settings" will be written in DOS notation as "Docume~1" and refer to the same directory, or the file name "beautiful_roses.jpg" will be written in DOS as "beauti~1.jpg".

Answer 2

~ is the tilde, an accent backspaced and printed over other letters for non-English languages. Nowadays the key does not produce a backspaceable character and is used for 'not' or 'circa'

Answer 3

Dos can't recognize long file names so it just uses the first six letters, a ~ and a 1....Like.... filena~1.dll. It sort of a placeholder.

Answer 4

It is often used on UNIX-like systems to describe the home directory of a user.

If you write "cd ~" in a shell (equivalent to a DOS prompt), you enter your home directory.

It is also used in eg. spanish, to be put on top of letters, like ã.

See also the source link

Answer 5

mainly used for some commands in DOS