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UNIX® Shells by Example, Third Edition
book

UNIX® Shells by Example, Third Edition

by Ellie Quigley
October 2001
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
1040 pages
22h 50m
English
Pearson
Content preview from UNIX® Shells by Example, Third Edition

13.5. Metacharacters

Metacharacters are special characters that are used to represent something other than themselves. As a rule of thumb, characters that are neither letters nor numbers may be metacharacters. The shell has its own set of metacharacters, often called shell wildcards. Shell metacharacters can be used to group commands together, to abbreviate filenames and pathnames, to redirect and pipe input/output, to place commands in the background, and so forth. Table 13.13 presents a partial list of shell metacharacters.

Table 13.13. Shell Metacharacters
Metacharacter Purpose Example Meaning
$ Variable substitution set name=Tom echo $name Tom Sets the variable name to Tom; displays the value stored there.
! History substitution !3 Reexecutes ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 013066538XPurchase book