Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!

Metacharacters are special characters that have particular meaning to your shell that dollar sign or hash mark prompt where you do your work. The two I want to look at are the asterisk and the question mark. The following is what they mean to the shell:

Extending our talk of listing files, you could list all files containing "ackle" by using this command:

$ ls *ackle* hackle hackles tackles

Similarly, you could find all the words that start with an "h" like this:

$ ls h* hackle hackles

Now, if you want to see all the seven-letter words in your directory, use this command:

$ ls ??????? hackles tackles

Each question mark represents a single letter position.