What does the single circumflex in the windows cmd shell mean: More?

Question

This might not be really a question related to programming, but I have wondered for a long time, what the following cmd command means....:

Just type a single circumflex in the cmd shell and windows will ask for more... And as long as you enter an even number of circumflexes, windows can't get enough. I have wondered since Vista... is this just some sort of "easter egg" or is there a purpose behind this?

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

3

It appears appending ^ just lets you continue to write a command in the next line:

C:\Users\Felk>echo ^
More? hello ^
More? world
hello world

Turns out ^ is just the escape character for the windows shell.

C:\Users\Felk>echo |
Syntaxerror.

C:\Users\Felk>echo ^|
|

Also see this answer

edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

Community

1
1

answered Nov 26 '15 at 20:08

Felk

7,720
2
35
65

this seems to be true, i would have never thought of that... I'll accept this as answer tomorrow, if nobody has a better explanation :p – Hafnernuss Nov 26 '15 at 20:10
Okay, that makes sense. Dank dir für deine Hilfe ;) – Hafnernuss Nov 26 '15 at 20:18
Kein Ding, hab selber was gelernt! – Felk Nov 26 '15 at 20:19
Circumflex is an escape character according to https://stackoverflow.com/a/20342902/521554 – LosManos Oct 24 '17 at 07:00

What does the single circumflex in the windows cmd shell mean: More?

1 Answers1

Linked