In Bash, there appear to be several variables which hold special, consistently-meaning values. For instance, ./myprogram &; echo $! will return the PID of the process which backgrounded myprog...
bash - What are the special dollar sign shell variables ... - Stack ...
bash - What is the purpose of "&&" in a shell command? - Stack Overflow
If not quoted, it is a pattern match! (From the Bash man page: "Any part of the pattern may be quoted to force it to be matched as a string."). Here in Bash, the two statements yielding "yes" are pattern matching, other three are string equality:
What is the operator =~ called? I'm not sure it has a name. The bash documentation just calls it the =~ operator. Is it only used to compare the right side against the left side? The right side is considered an extended regular expression. If the left side matches, the operator returns 0, and 1 otherwise. Why are double square brackets required when running a test? Because =~ is an operator of ...
In Bash, when you hit enter, a fork + exec + wait happens like above, and bash then sets $? to the exit status of the forked process. Note: for built-in commands like echo, a process need not be spawned, and Bash just sets $? to 0 to simulate an external process.