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1 pointsby codedromeover 5 years ago
I have noticed that educational institutions (.edu in the US, .ac in the UK) usually have staff pages in the format /~[name]. I don't think I have seen this elsewhere. Is there a reason?

2 comments

troydavisover 5 years ago
It’s the Unix convention (shell expansion) for a the path to a user’s home directory: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;libc&#x2F;manual&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;Tilde-Expansion.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;libc&#x2F;manual&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;Tilde-Exp...</a><p>As a result, many Web servers exposed user-provided Web content using the same path: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;httpd.apache.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;trunk&#x2F;howto&#x2F;public_html.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;httpd.apache.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;trunk&#x2F;howto&#x2F;public_html.html</a><p>Universities have continued using that convention, probably because professors have accounts (and thus URLs) for decades.
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codedromeover 5 years ago
I included a tilde in the title and it and the text after it disappeared. Strange.