character or (shift-) key to be interpreted as modifying the value of the character (or key) following it in a string (or produced simultaneously in typing), either by prefixing a special character (" ^X-Q terminates the program"), or by interpreting it literally, thus escaping the default special interpretation of the following character.
a single character that is used in place of another character or set of characters.
In a regular expressions, a metacharacter is a special character that is expanded to match patterns.
Characters which have special meanings. For the shell these include wildcards, quotes, and logical operators. In regular expressions, metacharacters are used to specify strings to match.
a character or sequence of characters that has special meaning
a character that has a general meaning instead of a literal meaning in a regular expression
a character that performs a special function in the shell, like expanding a file name or redirecting output
a special character that the regex engine will use to apply "rules" for your regex
a special character within a search expression that controls how keywords and connectors are understood
a symbol with special meaning (an operator or delimiter) in the regular-expression syntax
special characters that are neither letters nor numbers but have special meaning either to the shell or the operating system, e.g., and , which perform redirection, and |, which "pipes" commands. For a metacharacter to be interpreted literally and not for its special meaning, it must be placed in quotation marks, e.g., `'.
(n.) A character having a special meaning to the UNIX® system. For example, the UNIX shell interprets the ? character to represent any single character. See also wildcard.
A character that represents something besides itself. The right angle bracket () and the vertical bar (|) are examples of Unix metacharacters. Wildcards are also metacharacters.
A character that, when unquoted, separates words. A metacharacter is a blank or one of the following characters: `|', `&', `;', `(', `)', `', or `'.
A special character that is replaced by matching character strings when interpreted by the shell. Metacharacters, which define the form of a string, and literal characters, which match only themselves, make up regular expression
A special character used in a regular expression to provide a certain pattern for searching.
One of the following characters: ;, &, (, ), |, , , newline, space, and tab.
A character that is interpreted by UNIX shells and Wisconsin Package programs in a defined manner. The most common examples of metacharacters are the wildcards * and ?. The * wildcard metacharacter is interpreted to mean "any character or no character" and the ? wildcard metacharacter is interpreted to mean "any one character." For example, in the command % ls *.seq, the *.seq is interpreted as any filename ending with the extension ".seq". In the example % ls hsp?.seq, the hsp?.seq is interpreted as the name of any file beginning with "hsp" followed by one alphanumeric character, and ending with ".seq". You can use wildcard metacharacters to specify databases or divisions of databases within the Wisconsin Package. For example, GenEMBL:* specifies all of the entries in the GenEMBL database; Ba:* specifies all of the bacterial entries in GenEMBL; and Sw:hsp* specifies all of the sequences in SWISS-PROT that begin with "hsp". For more information, see "UNIX Metacharacter Differences" in Appendix D, Command and Keystroke Differences Between OpenVMS and UNIX.
A metacharacter is a character that has a special meaning (instead of a literal meaning) to a computer program, such as a shell interpreter or a regular expression engine.