what does a ~ mean in URL names?

I see it a lot especially on .edu sites

- nancy -

>what does a ~ mean in URL names?
>
>I see it a lot especially on .edu sites

On UNIX systems, for some shells ~username/ at the beginning of a
path refers to "the home directory of user <username>", and ~/
refers to "the home directory of the current user".

Apache may be set up so that ~username at the beginning of the file
path portion of the URL refers to a particular subdirectory (often
called public_html) of that user's home directory. This gives each
user their own web space in a fairly easy-to-set-up way.

It's just a URL, but it might give away the username of the user
who owns it.