You do indeed seem right on most of those points, Jured, but there's a couple that bear a closer look. I'm sure > doesn't need to be escaped when not inside a <> construction (just like the HTML I'm writing now, which is rather interesting, in a cool meta- sort of way, but I'm going off on a tangent)... but in that case, I'd escape it anyway, for parallelism. As to the last point, the meaning of $ did indeed change, and he meant $$, not $, since that is a newline in the middle of the string.
Confession: It does an Immortal Body good.