Linux Shells by Example

10.5. Metacharacters

Metacharacters are special characters that are used to represent something other than themselves. As a rule of thumb, characters that are neither letters nor numbers may be metacharacters. The shell has its own set of metacharacters, often called shell wildcards. Shell metacharacters can be used to group commands together, to abbreviate filenames and pathnames, to redirect and pipe input/output, to place commands in the background, and so forth. Table 10.13 presents a partial list of shell metacharacters.

Table 10.13. Shell Metacharacters

Metacharacter	Purpose	Example	Meaning
$	Variable substitution	set name=Tom echo $name Tom	Sets the variable name to Tom; displays the value stored there.
!	History substitution ...