What is the meaning of the symbol ":" and "\\"?

As with many programming languages, when writing a String , there are strings that return a value such as:

"\a" --> Sinal sonoro
"\n" --> Quebra de linha
"\t" --> Tabulação horizontal

And in ShellScript the backslash or Arrab works the same, but in that case, any character after Arrab is passed to String .

sh ~: touch my keys # cria os arquivos my e keys
sh ~: touch my\ keys # cria o arquivo my keys

And when you put them in \ sequence, the arrab is written.

sh ~: echo escreve-ndo \ arrab
#escrevendo \ arrab

While : , has a difference where it is used, in case cut -d : is creating a delimiter for the information to be released.

echo "Saida: Meu texto!!!!" > saida
cut -d : -f 1 saida
#Saida

That is, it will write content up before : .

In% w / o% w / w% represents a character to be replaced.

echo "dados:lista" | tr : \- # dados-lista

But tr can in some cases be used to assign null value to files or to a disk.

echo "dados para o arquivo" > arquivo
:>arquivo
cat arquivo

The archive content will be empty.