Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

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 12.2.

Table 12.2. 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 ...