Special Characters

Special characters, which have a special meaning to the shell, are discussed in “Filename Generation/Pathname Expansion” on page 207. These characters are mentioned here so that you can avoid accidentally using them as regular characters until you understand how the shell interprets them. For example, avoid using any of these characters in a filename (even though emacs and some other programs do) until you learn how to quote them (next). The standard special characters are

  & ; | * ? ' " ` [ ] ( ) $ < > { } ^ # / \ % ! ~ +