1. The | keyboard character (the Shift-Backslash character above the Enter key on a typical 101-key keyboard). It is often used to feed the output from one command or program to another. For example, history | grep mcopy sends the contents of the .bash_history file (via the history command) to the grep program, searching for the string "mcopy". (Also, see Append Symbol and Redirection Symbol.) From I-gloss