Escaping Special Characters
As you've already seen, the following characters have special meaning to CMD:
< > ( ) & | , ; "
If you need to use any of these characters as part of a command-line argument to be given to a program (for example, to have the find command search for the character >), you need to escape the character by placing a caret (^) symbol before it.This indicates that the character is to be treated like any other character and removes its special meaning.To pass a ^ character as an argument, type ^^.
For example, the echo command types its arguments in the Command Prompt window. The command
echo <hello>
causes a problem because CMD thinks you want to redirect input from a file named hello and that you want to redirect output to...well, there is no filename after >, so CMD would print an error message. However, the command
echo ^<hello^>
prints <hello>.
In this tutorial:
- The CMD Command-Line
- CMD Versus COMMAND
- Running CMD
- Opening a Command Prompt Window with Administrator Privileges
- CMD Options
- Disabling Command Extensions
- Command-Line Processing
- Console Program Input and Output
- Using the Console Window
- I/O Redirection and Pipes
- Copy and Paste in Command Prompt Windows
- Command Editing and the History List
- Name Completion
- Enabling Directory Name Completion
- Multiple Commands on One Line
- Grouping Commands with Parentheses
- Arguments, Commas, and Quotes
- Escaping Special Characters
- Configuring the CMD Program
- The Search Path
- Changing the Path
- Predefined and Virtual Environment Variables
- Setting Default Environment Variables
- Built-in Commands
- Extended Commands
- Listing Files with the Dir Command
- Paginating Long Listings
- Printing Directory Listings
- Sorting Listings
- Locating Alternate File Streams
- Setting Variables with the Set Command
- Conditional Processing with the if Command
- Scanning for Files with the for Command
- Using the for Command's Variable
- Processing Directories
- Numerical for Loop
- Getting More Information