47} Is it possible to echo the redirection symbol in a script?

There are several examples to that effect throughout the FAQ at hand. You may wish to search through the FAQ for instances of the caret ^ escape character.^*)   Note that on occasion the caret can also be used to continue a command line.


An example of echoing the pipe symbol:
will produce
while
will produce
Also note the option of using the following to produce the same result

It is not the only method, though, as reminded in Google Groups Dec 29 2003, 2:39 am [M]
The line below is an exact extract from that message:

A second option to produce the said text is
which also will give you
The difference is that set /p method will not produce a new line while the second one will.

You could also write

One way of producing any character is using G(nu)AWK. For example, to produce the redirection symbol (>) Hex 3E apply
Note that in the UNIX-originating gawk the escape character is \ not ^ hence the \"

Likewise, VBScript could be used
Or, more generally
Also the methods presented in the MS-DOS+Win..95/98/ME FAQ item
  "38) Is it possible to echo the redirection symbol in a batch?"
  http://www.elisanet.fi/tsalmi/pc/link/tsbat.zip
should work. But these are just additional, complicated ways of doing what is already covered by the ^ escape character.

Furthermore, consider the following example demonstrating a difference between MS-DOS+Win../95/98/Me COMMAND.COM batches and NT/2000/XP CMD.EXE scripts. The user wishes to echo the ampersand (&) character. For the former neither the caret ^ nor the ampersand & has a special meaning while for the latter they do. For CMD.EXE the caret in the escape character and the ampersand & the multiple commands on one command line character. Thus given
MS-DOS+Win../95/98/Me will produce while NT/2000/XP will produce Hence for NT/2000/XP the solution is
The NT/2000/XP special characters which require escaping are space&()[]{}^=;!'+,`~

Let's take an example. How does one echo the following from within a command script?
The answer
One alternative, just for demonstration, is
Escaping must be done the right number of times. For example will produce
because the quotes already effect the escaping once. That same output would, of course, also be produced by
demonstrating the need to escape exactly the right number of times to get the results one may be striving at.


A somewhat similar question to echoing a redirection character is the question how to echo a % from within a script.

Consider another special demonstration
Why the 17? Because "&" is an escaped bitwise AND as per e.g. item #102.

Still a further example of an "irregular" escape character in cmd.exe command line programming:
The cases matched in the above example were -x"*.*" and -x "*.*"

Question:
> I have a file (saytest.txt) which includes the following line
>  3EPlus v4.0 (C:\Program Files\3EPlus4\)
>How do I match it with FINDSTR? It does not seem to work.

This is exactly what has been covered in this item. It is about the escape characters. The relevant search is

---

Consider a real-life example involving among other things echoing < and >. The task is about converting between the email address book formats of different programs.

In the address book of the UNIX elm the format of an invidiual adress is
tsuvasa     = Timo Salmi = ts@uvasa.fi
In Thunderbird the format is the very common
Timo Salmi <ts@uvasa.fi>
and in the CSV (Microsoft Excel Comma Separated Values File) format
,,Timo Salmi,,ts@uvasa.fi,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Given an elm address book, the task is 1) to pick an address based on the first field (called the alias) and to convert the found address into 2) the Thunderbird compliant format, and 3) the CSV format.