What do you mean by metacharacters?

1.	What do you mean by metacharacters?
Answer» In a DATA FIELD or program, metacharacters are special characters that provide information about other characters. In SHELLS, they're called regular expressions. A character that is neither a letter nor a number is generally considered a metacharacter. Using shell metacharacters, you can group together commands, redirect and pipe input/output, put commands in the background, reduce the size of file names and path names, etc. You can USE them as wildcards to specify a file name without typing in the file's full name. The most COMMON metacharacters are as follows: *Asterisk ()*: Use the to match any character. Question Mark (?): It matches a single character in the filename. Brackets ([…]): The metacharacters used here match some specified characters. Hyphen (-): When placed within [] (brackets), the - metacharacter matches a specified range.

Answer»

In a DATA FIELD or program, metacharacters are special characters that provide information about other characters. In SHELLS, they're called regular expressions. A character that is neither a letter nor a number is generally considered a metacharacter. Using shell metacharacters, you can group together commands, redirect and pipe input/output, put commands in the background, reduce the size of file names and path names, etc. You can USE them as wildcards to specify a file name without typing in the file's full name. The most COMMON metacharacters are as follows:

Asterisk (*): Use the * to match any character.
Question Mark (?): It matches a single character in the filename.
Brackets ([…]): The metacharacters used here match some specified characters.
Hyphen (-): When placed within [] (brackets), the - metacharacter matches a specified range.

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