Redirection

(1) In operating system shells, redirection refers to directing input and output to files and devices other than the default I/O devices. By default, input generally comes from the keyboard or mouse, and output goes to the display monitor. With a redirection operator, you can override these defaults so that a command or program takes input from some other device and sends output to a different device.

In DOS and UNIX systems, the redirection operators are for input and > for output. For example, the DOS command

sort c:sorted

takes input from a file called list, sorts it, and sends output to a file called sorted.

(2) See meta refresh.