Is the tilde symbol okay to use in folder names? The filesystem is EXT4?

Question

I'm archiving some of my Audio CDs to FLAC and I would like the album titles to include the catalog number and the location plus country, like so:

/Music/
  Laura Branigan/
    1982 - Branigan [19289-2 (250 772) ~ US 1985]

The catalog number already includes the dash (as you can see in 19289-2), so using that as a separator later on doesn't make sense. I was thinking about using the tilde ~ as a separator instead, to separate the catalog number from location/year.

Will that naming convention cause any trouble in the filesystem?

Does this answer your question? What characters are safe in cross-platform file names for Linux, Windows and OS-X — gronostaj, Aug 06 '21 at 16:08
Your link mentions this: ^ #%&!@:+={}'~ and [`] all have special meanings in many shells, and are annoying to work around, and so should be avoided. They also tend to look horrible in URLs.however I'm not willing to use the tilde in CLI or URLs, and as long as the whole name of the folder is between double quotes$ cd "Name of Folder With ~ Tile"` what could be wrong? — Zoltan King, Aug 06 '21 at 16:32

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 06 '21 at 16:14

In general in Linux ~ undergoes tilde expansion, which is suppressed by quotes (or other means of escaping like \). Since you have spaces in file names, you will use quotes anyhow, I gather. And you should do this by default anyhow. So it should be ok. Same as here:

$ touch "~"
$ ls -l "~"
-rw-r----- 1 tomasz tomasz 0 Aug  6 18:12 '~'

Is the tilde symbol okay to use in folder names? The filesystem is EXT4?

1 Answers1