A lot of keys have special meanings in some context or other.
Quoting is used to remove the special meaning of characters or
words: quotes can disable special treatment for special
characters, they can prevent reserved words from being
recognized as such and they can disable parameter expansion.
Escape characters are used to remove the special meaning from a
single character. A non-quoted backslash, \, is used as an
escape character in Bash. It preserves the literal value of the
next character that follows, with the exception of newline. If a
newline character appears immediately after the backslash, it
marks the continuation of a line when it is longer that the
width of the terminal; the backslash is removed from the input
stream and effectively ignored. franky ~> date=20021226 franky
~> echo $date 20021226 franky ~> echo \$date $date In this
example, the variable date is created and set to hold a value.
The first echo displays the value of the variable, but for the
second, the dollar sign is escaped. Single