Is this homework of some sort?

By default, GNU ls will quote entries containing certain special or unprintable characters. For example, if a file name contains the space character, GNU ls will print e.g. 'hello world'. This quoting is done using Bash syntax.

In Bash, 'folder'$'\003' (or $'folder\003') represents the text folder followed by octal byte 3. Because you use Fish instead of Bash, this doesn't work­—it has a different syntax to specify unprintable/special characters.

I can tell you how to refer to this file in Fish, but I hesitate to do it if it's for homework. What I will do is point you to the part of the Fish documentation where this is (kind of) explained: in Fish for bash users#Quoting.

What tool or program would you recommend for learning touch typing on Linux?

I don't have a particular recommendation, but in addition to local applications, there are also websites that you can try. The keyword you want to search for is "typing tutor", e.g. on Debian.

For someone whose native language isn’t English, would you recommend learning on their native keyboard layout or switching to the US QWERTY layout for programming purposes?

For programming, the most important thing is that you can type the full set of characters present on US-QWERTY without too much acrobatics, because programming languages tend to use all/most of them.

Other than that it's just down to your preference and comfort. I don't recommend putting stock on any hype related to typing speed.

Do languages that use non-Latin alphabets (Asian, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew) have upper and lower case letters?

Greek has upper and lower case. From mathematics/physics you may have come across e.g. the ones for sigma (Σ, σ). Cyrillic also has them; most look the same between the upper & lower case variants, just bigger/smaller (Л, л), but there are some that differ (А, а).

I don't think most Asian scripts have letter cases. Javanese script does have upper case but only for a small subset of letters and they are generally not used anymore.

What about serif or sans-serif?

Cyrillic and Greek, yes. There are also equivalents to the serif and sans-serif typefaces in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean typography.

How do they show emphasis?

On the Web, boldface (but not italics) is very commonly used across various writing systems. Obviously no all caps for those without capital letters.

Their blog has regular updates regarding Exchange support, if you're interested.

It doesn't launch the new binary at all. When the current process wants to create a new process, instead of doing fork+exec (which launches the new binary and wreaks havoc because versions now don't match), it simply tells the ForkServer (a different process running the old binary) to fork (split) itself.

Chromium also does this; they call their equivalent to ForkServer the zygote process and this article explains it really well.

The article mentions "GNU getopt" but as far as I know GNU doesn't have a getopt utility; the version on most Linux OSes comes from util-linux. (Perhaps the author is confusing it with the C function with the same name.)

Note that other getopt implementations have different features and some are simply broken. For example, BSD getopt doesn't support long options and comes with this known bug:

Arguments containing whitespace or embedded shell metacharacters generally will not survive intact; this looks easy to fix but isn't.

For cross-platform scripts it's probably best to use the getopts shell builtin instead, the downside being it only supports fairly basic (POSIX) syntax even on Bash.

All external links from news.itsfoss.com articles have that ref parameter added. For example, see the links in this article about the Danish ministry that is switching to LibreOffice.

Edit: This is apparently something that the CMS they use, Ghost, does by default.