Guest andrea@NOSPAMPLEASE.com Posted July 20, 2007 Posted July 20, 2007 Hi all, I have a question about the Windows command line interpreter: The ? symbol replaces one character with boolean true, the * symbol replaces one sequence of characters with boolean true, but what does the ^ symbol do? Just try to run these commands and you'll see it must have a special meaning: ECHO ^ ECHO ^^ ECHO ^^^ ECHO ^^^^ same on filenames. If a file contains ^ in its name, I am forced to specify it between quotes even if it doesn't contain any space! Thanks, Andrea
Guest Ayush Posted July 20, 2007 Posted July 20, 2007 Re: What's the ^ command line symbol for? [andrea@NOSPAMPLEASE.com] wrote-: > Hi all, > I have a question about the Windows command line interpreter: > > The ? symbol replaces one character with boolean true, the * symbol replaces > one sequence of characters with boolean true, but what does the ^ symbol do? > > Just try to run these commands and you'll see it must have a special meaning: > ECHO ^ > ECHO ^^ > ECHO ^^^ > ECHO ^^^^ > > same on filenames. If a file contains ^ in its name, I am forced to specify > it between quotes even if it doesn't contain any space! ^ is the escape char. For example, if you want to echo "&", you cannot run: Echo & because & is a special char to separate commands. But you can use ^ char to escape it: Echo ^& Good Luck, Ayush. -- XP-Tips [Adjust the vertical space between icons] : http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/tips/iconspace.mspx
Guest Pegasus \(MVP\) Posted July 20, 2007 Posted July 20, 2007 Re: What's the ^ command line symbol for? <andrea@NOSPAMPLEASE.com> wrote in message news:46a0b27d$0$10625$4fafbaef@reader2.news.tin.it... > > Hi all, > I have a question about the Windows command line interpreter: > > The ? symbol replaces one character with boolean true, the * symbol > replaces > one sequence of characters with boolean true, but what does the ^ symbol > do? > > Just try to run these commands and you'll see it must have a special > meaning: > ECHO ^ > ECHO ^^ > ECHO ^^^ > ECHO ^^^^ > > same on filenames. If a file contains ^ in its name, I am forced to > specify > it between quotes even if it doesn't contain any space! > > Thanks, > Andrea > Not only is ^ the escape character but it is also the line continuation character. When you type echo ^ then Windows expects to get a further line of text. Thus the lines echo My name is ^ echo Andrea will generate the line "My name is Andrea" on the screen.
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