Maximum Linux Security

Appendix E. Glossary

;

The ; metacharacter is often used to separate shell commands that will be executed sequentially (such as command1;command2). ; is also used in some programming languages (Perl, C, C++) to end a statement. For example:

print "This statement ends with a semicolon\n";

#

The # metacharacter is used for many things, including the following:

• In anchor pointers in HTML documents. The # metacharacter precedes target names. Targets allow users to navigate to specific points inside a single Web page. You may have seen such anchor references in URLs, like this: http://www.mcp.com/index.html#toc. This would take you to the toc target in the document index.html.

• To comment out lines in scripts and configuration files. Any line following ...