Question

What are meta-characters?

(a) special characters having predefined meaning to the shell

(b) special symbols

(c) shell symbols

(d) command symbols

This question was posed to me in an internship interview.

This key question is from Commands topic in portion The Unix Architecture & General Purpose Utilities of Unix

Answer 1

Right choice is (a) special characters having predefined meaning to the shell

To explain: meta-characters are special characters having a predefined meaning to the shell. They are used as wild cards for special purposes like pattern matching, output redirecting etc. *, |, < are meta-characters.