Discuss the use of meta-characters in Linux shell, such as redirection and pipe. Provide one example and explaination

 

Answer:Metacharacters are special characters that are used to represent something other than themselves . As a rule of thumb, characters that are neither letters nor numbers may be metacharacters. Like grep , sed , and awk , the shell has its own set of metacharacters, often called shell wildcards . Shell metacharacters can be used to group commands together, to abbreviate filenames and pathnames, to redirect and pipe input/output, to place commands in the background, and so forth.

> redirects the output to file example ls > file

< redirects input from a file example ls < file

| pipe command is used to direct output from command(like ls) to another (like grep)

We can use brackets when searching for patterns. Brackets let us specify specific letters that we want to match anywhere in the pattern.

example ls | grep [abc] => This lists all files that contain the letters a, b, or c.