[OT] Does "~" always point to $HOME?

[youshi10 at u.washington.edu]

Hello again,
     I'm revising some documentation that has examples of running Unix commands and I want to make sure that my steps are correct, such that I can substitute the tilde character ('~') for $HOME. The only issue I can see with this is an improper configuration with sudo (ran into some problems with $HOME in the past using sudo on Gentoo), but I'm pretty sure that sudo's setup on the machine cluster properly.
TIA,
-Garrett