what type of string may special characters be treated inside quotes?
Special Characters and Quoting
The characters <, >, |, and & are four examples of special characters that have particular meanings to the shell. The wildcards we saw earlier in this chapter (*, ?, and [...]) are also special characters.
Table 1.6 gives the meanings of all special characters within shell command lines only. Other characters have special meanings in specific situations, such as the regular expressions and string-handling operators that we’ll see in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.
Table 1-6. Special Characters
Character Meaning See Chapter
~ Home directory 1
` Command substitution (archaic) 4
# Comment 4
$ Variable expression 3
& Background job 1
* String wildcard 1
( Start subshell 8
) End subshell 8
\ Quote next character 1
| Pipe 1
[ Start character-set wildcard 1
] End character-set wildcard 1
{ Start command block 7
} End command block 7
; Shell command separator 3
' Strong quote 1
<"> Weak quote 1
< Input redirect 1
> Output redirect 1
/ Pathname directory separator 1
? Single-character wildcard 1
! Pipeline logical NOT 5