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One character carrying three unrelated jobs, none of which is obvious from the shape.
In front of a figure it is currency. At the end of a regular expression it anchors the pattern to the end of a line. In a shell it introduces a variable. Nothing about the S-with-a-stroke distinguishes them, and shell scripts routinely contain all three uses within a few lines of each other.
The same character. In a regular expression it anchors a pattern to the end of a line and has nothing to do with money.
| Dollar sign | Regular expression dollar anchor | |
|---|---|---|
| Position | Before an amount | At the end of a pattern |
| What it means | Currency | End of line |
| Matches any text | No | No — it matches a position, not a character |
| Third job | — | Introduces a variable in a shell |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Regular expression dollar anchor — The same character. In a regular expression it anchors a pattern to the end of a line and has nothing to do with money. | Commonly confused with Dollar sign — The same character. In a shell it also introduces a variable, and in a regular expression it anchors — neither has anything to do with money. |
Unicode Code Chart: Basic Latin (U+0000–U+007F)
The Unicode Consortium · retrieved 2026-07-30
Authoritative for the character's code point, name and block only. Unicode assigns identity; it does not define what a symbol means in use.
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-07-30
Tertiary reference. Used for widely-agreed identity and origin summary, not for contested detail or exact dates.
POSIX.1-2024, Regular Expressions
The Open Group / IEEE · retrieved 2026-08-01
Cited for the metacharacters of basic and extended regular expressions. Later dialects (PCRE, ECMAScript) extend this and diverge from it; where a record describes a construct POSIX does not define, it says so and is typed as documented practice.
Both are drawn as one continuous decorative stroke with a closed loop and a tail that crosses back over itself, which is why a description of the shape alone reaches both. The clef is far taller, spans a stave, and its spiral encircles one specific line — that encircled line is the note G, and it is the only reason the shape is drawn where it is.
The ampersand is a ligature of the Latin word et, still visible in some italic forms where the e and the t can be picked out. The Tironian et is a separate mark descending from a Roman shorthand, shaped like a small seven, and it is in daily public use in Ireland as the written form of 'agus'. A reader who knows only the ampersand takes the other for a numeral, which on a bilingual road sign produces a confidently wrong place name.
A building's assembly point is a safe place to stand once you are outside. A ship's muster station is a staffed step in a procedure: you are counted against a roll, briefed, and if necessary allocated to a survival craft, which is why it has a letter or a number and appears on your cabin door card. Both are green, both show grouped figures, and both are called an assembly point in ordinary speech — and treating a muster station as somewhere merely to wait is the misunderstanding drills exist to correct.
As punctuation the asterisk points at a footnote or marks a required field. In a filename pattern typed at a shell it matches any run of characters, including none — and the shell expands it against real filenames before the command runs, so the command never sees the pattern at all. That expansion is the part people are surprised by.