metacharactern.
/ˈmɛtəˌkarᵻktə/, U.S. /ˈmɛdəˌkɛr(ə)ktər/ 1. Philosophy. The character of a concept, etc., in a metalanguage; metalinguistic character. rare.
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1964 Mind 73 319 Though a meaningless expression cannot be used meaningfully, it can be mentioned meaningfully. Of course, in proceeding this way, we should be introducing meta-linguistic concepts into the logic and so changing its character. But..we could disguise this in much the same way as the meta-character of the modal concepts is disguised by introducing an operator ‘S’, say, which we might read as, ‘it is sense to say that..’.
2. Computing. A character that is defined as having a controlling role by the computer program or operating system in use, and that gives information about how other characters are to be determined or gives rise to a specific action.
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1982 Byte Apr. 298/2 Searching for a metacharacter itself requires using an ‘escape sequence’..a concept beginners find hard to grasp.
1990 UNIX World Oct. 155/1 With the eight-bit-clean shells, you can use metacharacters to identify file names containing these eight-bit characters... You can always use the shell's question mark (?) metacharacter, which matches any single character.
1996 Web Techniques Aug. 47/2 Shell metacharacters, such as |, *, and & characters.
This is a new entry (OED Third Edition, December 2001; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1964