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- literal characters, that just represent (and print as) themselves
- e.g. alphanumeric characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9
- metacharacters- these are special characters that are associated with an operation in the environment
- e.g. the Enter/Return key that ends the current line
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| Tip | ||
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When using the backslash ( \ ) to continue a text line, be careful not to enter any text after the backslash – just press Enter after it. Why? The backslash ( \ ) metacharacter is used to escape the next character, which means to treat it as a literal even if it is a metacharacter. As a line continuation indicator, the next character should be the linefeed from you pressing Enter. So instead of treating Enter as a metacharacter (ending the line) it treats it as a literal and just inserts a literallinefeed character ( \n ) in the text, then performs a linefeed operation giving you the > prompt on a new line. |
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Tab key completion also works on commands! Type "bowtie" and Tab twice to see all the programs in the bowtie2 and bowtie tool suites.