A pair of single quotes (‘) will prevent the shell from interpreting any metacharacter.

A pair of single quotes (') will prevent the shell from interpreting most metacharacters, but it will still allow the shell to interpret single quotes (') themselves. Inside single quotes, variables and most special characters are not expanded or interpreted. This is useful when you want to ensure that a string is treated literally and doesn’t undergo any changes by the shell.

However, if you need to use single quotes within a single-quoted string, you have to temporarily break out of the single quotes, insert the single quote using other means (e.g., \'), and then re-enter the single quotes.