title: Anaconda/Python site-packages subfolders with tilde in name - what are they?
body: <p>Today, I went to change the config of matplotlib. Searching <code>matplotlibrc</code> revealed I have two of them:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ecRAI.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ecRAI.png" alt="Screenshot of search results, with two entries: &lt;code&gt;C:\Anaconda3\Lib\site-packages\~-tplotlib\mpl-data&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;C:\Anaconda3\Lib\site-packages\matplotlib\mpl-data&lt;/code&gt;"></a></p>
  
  <p>Looking at the <code>site-packages</code> folder, I found a lot of packages have a tilde in their name:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/g6baj.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/g6baj.png" alt="Windows Explorer screenshot showing that site-packages contains many other folders starting with a &lt;code&gt;~&lt;/code&gt; symbol, like &lt;code&gt;~klearn&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;~yximport&lt;/code&gt;"></a></p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><code>~klearn</code> is <code>sklearn</code> , but there is another <code>sklearn</code> .</li>
  <li><code>~atplotlib</code> is matplotlib too, changed date is <code>2018-11</code></li>
  <li><code>~-tplotlib</code>'s changed date is <code>2019-3.15</code></li>
  <li><code>matplotlib</code>'s changed date is <code>2019-3.28</code> (I did update matplotlib recently)</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>What are these tilde name packages used for? Can I delete them safely?</p>