|: | is called the pipe character. It allows the result of one command to be piped to the input of the next command on the same line. A common example is ls -al | less which pipes the output of the ls -al command to the less pager, which lets you view the results of ls one page at a time.

Two adjacent pipes "||" represent the (binary?) or operator. If two commands on the same line are separated by the or operator, the second command will run only if the first command fails. (See &).

Contributors

• RandyKramer - 16 Feb 2002
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