What does the $ mean in Linux?

Question

I have to explain what the code below means

What does the dollar bit mean?

 user@Linux-003 ~ $

Answer 1

For this particular case following code means:

Somebody with user name "user" has logged in to the machine with host name "Linux-003".

"~" - represent the home folder of the user, conventionally it would be /home/user/, where "user" is the user name can be anything like /home/johnsmith.

"$" - is just a sign of the shell prompt, means that shell is ready to accept commands, you can understand it as a separator after which, you can interact with a shell. Can also be "#" which shows that root is the user who's session is going on.

Answer 2

Although most people don't know this, it actually stands for - Swag.

(It actually means "normal user" or "non-root user")

\# would dictate a root user.