A command issued by pressing a keyboard character in conjunction with the Control key. Manuals usually represent control key commands with the prefix CTRL- or CNTL-. For example, CTRL-N means the Control key and N pressed at the same time. Sometimes a control character is represented by a caret (for example, ^N is the same as CTRL-N).
What happens after you enter a Control key combination depends on what application is active. Certain Control key combinations are semi-standardized. For example, in Windows applications, CTRL-X usually cuts the selected text for pasting somewhere else.
