quick BASH question

so earlier my finger slipped and I accidental hit the wrong button (I typed in ls' please note the appostrophe.) this made some craziness happen in my terminal (example below) that I was curious about and was wondering if anyone could help. so allow me to cut to the proverbial chase.

cyrus@gizmotron:~$ ls'
>
>
>
>
>
>
and I can't get out of this and back to the command prompt without starting a new terminal session. first of all, what have I come across, second of all how do I get out of it, and third of all, is this feature useful and if so how can I use it?

I would be most utterly grateful for any light shed upon this subject
thank you

You entered an unpaired quote. Bash assumes that quotes and brackets always come in pairs so it concluded that you hadn't finished typing in your command. The > is a continuation prompt, used whenever a command is to go over one line. Bash will go on prompting you for a continuation until you enter the second quote.

Or until you Ctrl-C

awesome, thank you verymuch :)

Well if you ever have any more questions about bash, just refer to this guide:

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/abs-guide.html