15 Special Characters You Need to Know for Bash

How-To Geek

By Dave McKay

Updated Oct 11, 2023

That sequence of strange symbols on the Bash command line must mean something, right? We're breaking down special characters and how to use them.

Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek

Special characters often function like command short-hand, and tell Bash to perform a specific function without having to type out a longer, more verbose command.
The tilde (~) refers to the home directory, double periods (..) refers to the parent directory, and a single period (.) refers to the current directory.
Other important characters / for directory separation, # for comments, ? for wildcard characters, ; for separating commands, and | for piping commands together.

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