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There is a lot of detail on this chart, and it's far from complete.įrankly, skip over this for now. I have also included several combinations of characters just to make this table Here is a chart of the meta-characters the Bourne and C shell know There are some tricky bits, but I will mention them later when I cover the different shells. In other words, it doesn't matter which shell you use - because they all understand the three methods of quoting/escaping meta-characters - more or less. That is, what I describe here holds for all of the major varieties of shells, including the dreaded C shell. I wrote this tutorial in a shell-agnostic manner. To quote that character, so that it is passed to the program without If you need a regular expression, you must know if any of theĬharacters of the expression are meta-characters, and must know It could be the beginning of a variable name, or it could be When you quote a character, you ask the shell to leave it alone - and pass it on unchanged to the utility. In other works, you put quotes around the meta-characters to inticate to the shell that they are not special - as far as the shell is concerned. I want the utility to treat them special, not you!" The mechanism to do this is called quoting. Or to put it another way, you want to say "Hey Shell.
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Some characters are special to the Unix shell, and some are special to a utility like sed or grep.īefore you study regular expressions, it is important that you understand how to use the shell to send regular expressions to a program. The actual meaning depends on the program that sees this meta-character. This is part of my Unix tutorials series.įirst thing you have to understand is that certain characters, called meta-characters, have special meanings. Including identical quotes within quotes.The verbose and echo variables in the C shell.Using quotes to include spaces and characters in filenames.Quoting a single character with the backslash.Written by Bruce Barnett Table of Contents