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A typographic stroke, and the single most characteristic idea in shell scripting.
As a typographic mark the vertical bar separates alternatives or delimits a table column. Between two commands in a shell it connects the first one's output straight to the second one's input, so data flows through a chain without ever touching a file. Documentation calls both 'the pipe character', which is where the conflation comes from.
The same character. The vertical bar is the typographic mark; the pipe operator is what a shell does with it.
| Vertical bar | Shell pipe operator | |
|---|---|---|
| Read by | A person | The shell |
| What it does | Separates or delimits | Connects one command's output to the next one's input |
| Introduced | Typographic convention | Unix, 1973 |
| Defined by | Convention | POSIX shell grammar |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Shell pipe operator — The same character. The vertical bar is the typographic mark; the pipe operator is what a shell does with it. | Commonly confused with Vertical bar — The same character. The vertical bar is the typographic mark; the pipe operator is what a shell does with it. |
Unicode Code Chart: Basic Latin (U+0000–U+007F)
The Unicode Consortium · retrieved 2026-07-30
Authoritative for the character's code point, name and block only. Unicode assigns identity; it does not define what a symbol means in use.
POSIX.1-2024, Shell Command Language
The Open Group / IEEE · retrieved 2026-08-01
Cited for the shell's operator grammar — which characters are operators and what they do — and for nothing outside it. It standardises a notation that already existed rather than inventing one, so records here describe documented practice that POSIX also pins down.
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-08-01
Tertiary reference. Used for widely-agreed identity, origin and current use, not for contested detail or exact dates.
Both are drawn as one continuous decorative stroke with a closed loop and a tail that crosses back over itself, which is why a description of the shape alone reaches both. The clef is far taller, spans a stave, and its spiral encircles one specific line — that encircled line is the note G, and it is the only reason the shape is drawn where it is.
The ampersand is a ligature of the Latin word et, still visible in some italic forms where the e and the t can be picked out. The Tironian et is a separate mark descending from a Roman shorthand, shaped like a small seven, and it is in daily public use in Ireland as the written form of 'agus'. A reader who knows only the ampersand takes the other for a numeral, which on a bilingual road sign produces a confidently wrong place name.
A building's assembly point is a safe place to stand once you are outside. A ship's muster station is a staffed step in a procedure: you are counted against a roll, briefed, and if necessary allocated to a survival craft, which is why it has a letter or a number and appears on your cabin door card. Both are green, both show grouped figures, and both are called an assembly point in ordinary speech — and treating a muster station as somewhere merely to wait is the misunderstanding drills exist to correct.
As punctuation the asterisk points at a footnote or marks a required field. In a filename pattern typed at a shell it matches any run of characters, including none — and the shell expands it against real filenames before the command runs, so the command never sees the pattern at all. That expansion is the part people are surprised by.