A metacharacter's a character that's a special meaning (instead of a literal meaning) to a computer program, such as a shell interpreter or a regular expression engine. Examples In some Unix shells and Windows PowerShell, the ; (semicolon) character's a statement separator. In many regular expression engines, the . (dot) character matches any character, not just a dot. In XML and HTML, the & (ampersand) character introduces an HTML entity. In many programming languages, strings are delimite… (More on Metacharacter)