Why do you have to put ~/ before .bashrc when opening the .bashrc file? [duplicate]

Question

I'm wondering why it is required to put ~/ before .bashrc when opening the bashrc file.

To illustrate:

I normally open files on my system as follows:

vim filename.extension 

But while in the /home directory if I do the following:

vim .bashrc 

vim will open a new file called .bashrc

In order to open my bashrc file I must do as follows:

vim ~/.bashrc

Why?

My current system is Linux Mint 18.3

Answer 1

Your difficulty might come from this:

while in the /home directory

.bashrc isn’t in /home, it’s in your home directory (often /home/username, and yes, it’s confusing), which you can go to by typing

cd

Once you’re there,

vim .bashrc

will open the existing file.

Always using

vim ~/.bashrc

means you never need to think about where you are ;-).

Answer 2

The ~ or ~/ refers to the absolute path of your home directory a.k.a. /home/username.

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Additionally, if you try cd ~ or cd ~/ they will both do the same thing; the shortest option being simply cd. All three options take you to your home directory. NOT /home.

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Since .bashrc is located in your home directory, you must specify its location by adding the tilde, which allows you to point to home directory from wherever you are and thus access the .bashrc.

Of course, this works for any other files and folders located in your ~, for example:

• cd ~/myFolder
• ~/myScript.sh

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What you were trying to do is open .bashrc, but since vim checks in your current location if the file already exists or not, it will create a new .bashrc file in your current pwd, since there is no current .bashrc where you were trying to open it.

In other words, if you were in /home/username/someFolder/someSubFolder, doing the vim .bashrc command will create a new .bashrc file, since there is no already existing .bashrc and you did not point to the right path, which is /home/username/.bashrc (or ~/.bashrc).