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You can quote an absolute file name to prevent special characters and syntax in it from having their special effects. The way to do this is to add `/:' at the beginning.
For example, you can quote a local file name which appears remote, to prevent it from being treated as a remote file name. Thus, if you have a directory named /foo: and a file named bar in it, you can refer to that file in Emacs as `/:/foo:/bar'.
`/:' can also prevent `~' from being treated as a special character for a user's home directory. For example, /:/tmp/~hack refers to a file whose name is ~hack in directory /tmp.
Likewise, quoting with `/:' is one way to enter in the minibuffer a file name that contains `$'. However, the `/:' must be at the beginning of the minibuffer in order to quote `$'.
You can also quote wildcard characters with `/:', for visiting. For example, /:/tmp/foo*bar visits the file /tmp/foo*bar. However, in most cases you can simply type the wildcard characters for themselves. For example, if the only file name in /tmp that starts with `foo' and ends with `bar' is foo*bar, then specifying /tmp/foo*bar will visit just /tmp/foo*bar. Another way is to specify /tmp/foo[*]bar.