I'm getting the error message: Unknown user: VERSION

The following is the first line of my file:
~VERSION

Some of the lines in my file begin with a tilde. Is that causing a problem? Also I'm setting i=100 since what I'm after is in the top 100 lines of an otherwise very long file.

set LASInputFile = `ls *.[Ll][Aa][Ss] | head -1`
echo $LASInputFile
set j=1
while ($j <= 100)
set line=`cat $LASInputFile | head -$j | tail -1`
@ j = $j + 1
echo $line
end

Thanks for the help,

Paul H.