How Linux Works

Special Characters

If you know people who are into Linux, and you have some inexplicable desire to discuss it with them, you should know a few names for some of the special characters that you'll encounter. If you are infinitely amused by this sort of thing, look at the Jargon File (http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/) or its printed companion, The New Hacker's Dictionary [Raymond].

Table 1-1 on the next page lists a select set of the special characters, what they are, what people call them, and their uses. You have already seen many of these characters in this chapter. Not all meanings of each character are identified because there are too many to list. Some utilities, such as the Perl programming language, use nearly every one of these special ...