Korn Shell Programming by Example

Escape Character

The shell has a number of special characters available. Many times these are called metacharacters. These characters are special because the shell interprets them to mean something other than the actual character value. For example, the * is a metacharacter. When the shell sees an *, it replaces it with a 'glob' of stuff. The term glob is used in UNIX to represent a bunch of characters—I believe the letters stand for great lot of bytes.

Asterisk with No Escapes

For example, a simple find command using an * (and using no escape character) would look like the following example:

$ find . -name C*
./CHECKIT

In the previous example, the shell interprets the C* to mean “anything that starts with a capital C and has zero or more characters ...