In a shell, metacharacters are special characters that have specific meanings and functions beyond their literal values. They are used for various purposes, such as file redirection (e.g., >, <), command substitution (e.g., ` or $()), and wildcard matching (e.g., *, ?). When the shell encounters a metacharacter in a command line, it interprets it according to its predefined rules, allowing users to manipulate files, control processes, and execute commands more efficiently. Properly escaping or quoting metacharacters can prevent the shell from interpreting them, treating them instead as regular characters.
The metacharacter for command termination in Linux is semicolon ; .
To protect a metacharacter from shell interpretation in Linux, you can escape it using a backslash (\). For example, to use the dollar sign $ literally, you would write \$. Alternatively, you can enclose the entire string in single quotes (') to treat it as a literal string, like so: 'This is a $variable'. Double quotes (") can also be used, but they still allow certain expansions, so single quotes are generally safer for preventing interpretation.
Only one of the redirection operators will do this - the vertical bar or "pipe" symbol (|). It takes the standard output of one command and uses it as input to the next command in sequence.
The ampersand (&) puts any command in the background to start execution.
Shell metacharacters are special characters that have meaning in a Unix shell. For example, the '$' character followed by letters indicates that the shell variable with that name should have its value substituted. str=hello echo $str will echo out 'hello'. Other metacharacters include the semi-colon (for multiple commands on the same line), the backslash character for escaping special meanings, the single and double quote for combining fields, these are all metacharacters. A metacharacter changes the interpretation of things in various ways.
MS-DOS ended with Windows NT. It used file command.com to interpret all DOS commands. Win 2000, XP, Vista use a DOS Shell which emulates DOS but is not really DOS.
The shell interpreter must substitute or convert all metacharacters in the command line before the command parameters are given to a program. Once all metacharacters have been removed and replaced by their equivalents the program is then executed.
It was hard for him to interpret the document because it was in hieroglyphics.
Interpret, or Interprets.
u have to interpret youranswer
interpret it by letters...........
I can interpret the meaning of this poem.