Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

Metacharacters

Different metacharacters have different meanings, depending upon where they are used. In particular, regular expressions used for searching through text (matching) have one set of metacharacters, while the metacharacters used when processing replacement text (such as in a text editor) have a different set. These sets also vary somewhat per program. This section covers the metacharacters used for searching and replacing, with descriptions of the variants in the different utilities.