Linux symbols!?? What do they do?

[gb1986]

>, |, >> what do the symbols do?

[techieMoe]

The pipe "|" is useful in command-line operations, particularly when you want to string a number of commands together. It instructs the operating system to redirect the output of the first command into the second. Say, for instance, you wanted to view a directory's contents but didn't want to have everything scroll by so fast you couldn't read it. You can pipe the output of ls into a screen paginator like less and get single screen scrolling.

ls | less

I don't use ">" and ">>" very often in everyday life, but I do know you can use ">" to redirect output as well. For instance, say you wanted to dump the list of files in a directory to a text file:

ls > fileList.txt

The ">>" command appends the contents of files together. For more examples and better explanations than I can give regarding the Linux command line, see these links (and any links people post after me):

UNIX / Linux Tutorial for Beginners
LinuxCommand.org: Learn the Linux command line. Write shell scripts.