The only characters not allowed in a filename on Linux are 0x00 (the null byte) and '/'. It's perfectly valid to have '~' in it. You may be confused because yo

The only characters not allowed in a filename on Linux are 0x00 (the null byte) and '/'. It's perfectly valid to have '~' in it. You may be confused because your shell expands it to the value of $HOME -- which you can prevent by putting it inside single quotes. aaron@aspire5742:~$ echo hi > 'foo~bar.txt' aaron@aspire5742:~$ ls -l *.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 aaron aaron 3 Nov 16 03:20 foo~bar.txt aaron@aspire5742:~$ cat 'foo~bar.txt' hi aaron@aspire5742:~$