Terms
Escaping Escaping a character means to put a backslash (\) just before that character. Escaping can either remove the special meaning of a character in a shell command, or it can add special meaning as you saw with \n in the echo command. The character following the backslash is called an escaped character.
Literal characters These characters have no special meaning and cause no extra action to be taken. Quoting causes the shell to treat a wildcard as a literal character.
Meta-characters A character that has an extra meaning or causes some action to be taken by the shell or other UNIX commands.
Newline This is literally the linefeed character whose ASCII value is 10. In general, the newline character is a special shell character that indicates ...
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