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lang-bash
cacts the same as\c,cdoes not outputc: command not foundon STDERR, etc.) And I'm talking aboutshhere. Also, remember that this is a "clean-up" question, i.e. it's here to cover all such characters, so 19+ questions won't have to be asked. The question was posted thanks to an incident that different questions are asked for different such characters, we surely want to clean up here!?[are globbing operators, but isn't special in all contexts, but*seems to be, becauseecho *badlyechoes the contents of the current directory (not escaping anything).echo ?echoes a literal?andecho [echoes a literal[. Also,]is a globbing oberator too.*as a glob expands to all non-hidden files,?to non-hidden single-character files,[a-z]to files whose name is a single character between a and z and so on. When they don't match any file (like in your case for?), depending on the shell, you get a no-match error or the pattern expands to itself. In any case, even on shell where they expand to themselves, they need quoted in case they may match a file.*still expands to something.*is like?, if it doesn't match (for the case of*alone, that's when there are only hidden files in the current directory, fora*that's where there's no file whose name starts witha...), it either expands to itself (most Bourne-like shells), or raises a no-match error (csh,tcsh,fish(warning),zsh,bash -O failglob, early Unix shells), (or expands to nothing with the nullglob option of some shells or if there's another pattern that expands to something in csh, tcsh, zsh -o cshnullglob, early unix shells).