What is "metacharacter"

n. (context computing English) A character used to signify something other than its literal form, such as the asterisk when used as a wildcard.

A metacharacter is a character that has a special meaning (instead of a literal meaning) to a computer program, such as a shell interpreter or a regular expression engine.

In POSIX extended regular expressions, there are 14 metacharacters that must be preceded by a backslash "\" in order to drop their special meaning and be treated literally inside an expression: the open/close square brackets, "[" and "]"; the backslash "\"; the caret "^"; the dollar sign "$"; the period or dot "."; the vertical bar or pipe symbol "|"; the question mark "?"; the asterisk "*"; the plus-sign "+"; open/close curly braces, "{" and "}"; and open/close parenthesis, "(" and ")".

If you want to use any of these characters as a literal in a regex, you need to escape them with a backslash. For example, to match the arithmetic expression "(1+1)*3=6" with a regex, then the correct regex is "$1\+1$\*3=6". Otherwise, the parenthesis, plus-sign, and asterisk will have a special meaning.