On Mon, 7 Jan 2008 13:28:30 UTC, Peter_Flass@yahoo.com wrote:

> I have just found out that the caret (^) is a metacharacter for
> CMD.EXE. It appears that its function may be to quote the character
> that follows it. In any case, *the caret is stripped out of the
> command line passed to programs*, unless it is represented by two
> carets (^^) or contained in double quotes ("^"). Questions in no
> particular order:
> 1. Am I the only one who didn't know this?
> 2. Is this documented anywhere?
> 3. Am I right that this is its function?
> 4. Does 4OS2 behave the same way?
> 5. What is the purpose of this?
>
> Thanks to any and all who can enlighten me.

See here:

http://www.tavi.co.uk/os2pages/cmd.html

Peter_Flass@yahoo.com schrieb:
> I have just found out that the caret (^) is a metacharacter for
> CMD.EXE. It appears that its function may be to quote the character
> that follows it. In any case, *the caret is stripped out of the
> command line passed to programs*, unless it is represented by two
> carets (^^) or contained in double quotes ("^"). Questions in no
> particular order:
> 1. Am I the only one who didn't know this?

I guess no.

> 2. Is this documented anywhere?

Yes.

> 3. Am I right that this is its function?

It works as designed.

> 4. Does 4OS2 behave the same way?

Don't know.

> 5. What is the purpose of this?

Pass '>', '<', '|', '&' or other meta characters to an application.


Marcel

Peter_Flass@yahoo.com schrieb:
> I have just found out that the caret (^) is a metacharacter for
> CMD.EXE. It appears that its function may be to quote the character
> that follows it. In any case, *the caret is stripped out of the
> command line passed to programs*, unless it is represented by two
> carets (^^) or contained in double quotes ("^"). Questions in no
> particular order:
> 1. Am I the only one who didn't know this?
> 2. Is this documented anywhere?
> 3. Am I right that this is its function?
> 4. Does 4OS2 behave the same way?
> 5. What is the purpose of this?
>
> Thanks to any and all who can enlighten me.

The caret is a special character even for DOS and Windows XP with
exactly the same behaviour.

Lars