What’s that ~ squiggly mark in front of my filenames?

You’ve probably seen files in your file folders with tildes (~) in front of them like this:

If you’ve always wondered what these files are, read on. From Wikipedia: “The tilde symbol is used to prefix hidden temporary files that are created when a document is opened in Windows. For example, when you open a Word document called “Document1.doc,” a file called “~$cument1.doc” is created in the same directory. This file contains information about which user has the file open, to prevent multiple users from attempting to change a document at the same time.”

So if you have the option set in Windows Explorer under Folder Options to “Show hidden files and folders”, when you open a file, you see another file open as described above with a tilde in front of it, and the icon in front of this file name is grayed out (this is the standard operation for most, but not all programs). If the program crashes or “terminates early” then these files will often times be left over and look as shown above. If you see a group of files like this in your folder and you know that the related files are not open, they are perfectly safe to delete. They don’t take up much space – they are only 1kb in size, but it is good housekeeping to get rid of them.