Echoing the character &
 

Can anyone out there show me how to actually echo the character &

echo '&', echo "&", echo \&, etc. should work fine. Quoting or escaping, that is.

& \ . * /

Are called metacharacters for the shell because the have special meaning

& - used to send a command to run in background

\ = so-called escape character because it means 'take the next chacacter literally'
as in echo \&

. current directory

* wildcard for file specifications

/ path separator, name of the root of all paths

...and all these metacharacters can be quoted/escaped as ignotus describes.

Was it worth dredging up a four month old thread, just to say that?

Proabably :) get the humor... or not, it matters little

Was it worth dredging up a 2 month dead thread, just to say that?

:banana:

Was it worth dredging up a 4 hour old thread just to say that?