About \ (Back slash) - Shell Programming and Scripting

demwz · #4 (**permalink**) 11-18-2008

There are some special characters in Unix for ex :" $ & \ ~"
putting a \ before a special character inverts the special meaning of a character. so it is getting a simple ascii text

Code:

sptmw@mwvm:~$ echo ~
/home/sptmw
sptmw@mwvm:~$ echo \~
~

also the are simple ascii letters which can be turned to special characters by putting a \ in front
echo \b hello
in some terminals causes bold text

and one line \[ENTER]
second line

means ignore the [ENTER] Key an handle everything as one line