Special Characters

Some characters have special meaning to Linux shells; these characters represent commands, denote specific use for surrounding text, or provide search parameters. Special characters provide a sort of shorthand by incorporating these rather complex meanings into a simple character. Some special characters are shown in Table 13.2.

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TABLE 13.2 Special Shell Characters

Special characters are very useful to you when you’re creating shell scripts, but if you inadvertently use a special character as part of variable names or strings, your program behaves incorrectly. As you learn in later parts of this section, you can use one of the ...

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