The Tilde-Dollar Sign Combination

     Have you ever opened up a folder to look for a file, and see a file that started with a "~$" and then continued with a more common file name and extension?  Perhaps the rest of its name was the same as another file in that folder, but the file's icon (like the blue W for Microsoft Word or the green X for Microsoft Excel) was sort of faded.

     That's the indication for a temporary file that is currently open (or, at least the computer "thinks" it's currently open).

     If you're creating a Web site, and want to link to this file, DON'T.  It's not a permanent file.  If you link to it, you will receive an error or "Page Not Found" message when you attempt to test the link.

     Microsoft's operating system has an interesting way of saving files.  It's why you can "recover" a file, even if the computer shuts down or crashes while you're working on a document or editing a saved document.  When you save a document, of course, the file is saved in ROM (that is, Read-Only Memory.  It becomes a part of your computer's hard drive (or portable drive), wherever the file is being stored).

     When you edit that file, a temporary copy of the file is opened in RAM (Random-Access Memory), and changes are made to that temporary document - which is named with the ~$ designation.  When you "save" the file, the temporary file overwrites the stored file to save the changes, and closes the ~$ file which disappears from RAM, freeing the space in order to perform other operations.  The more RAM your computer has, the more documents and programs can be open and processed at once.  The "faster" your processor, the faster those files can be processed.

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