Normally (because the default shell on OSX is bash), tilde (~
) is expanded to your home directory. That is documented in the Bash Reference Manual: Tilde Expansion.
However, your directory listing shows that you have created an entry "~"
in your desktop, either by bypassing the default behavior (quoting, as mentioned in How to manually expand a special variable (ex: ~ tilde) in bash), or due to some error finding the actual home-directory. Since you say this is in any directory, it sounds as if (during the account creation), you have moved/renamed things, e.g., a different disk drive, so that bash finds no actual directory at the location where it should. So you get a literal "~"
.