Argument separation in bash/command prompt

Question

the other day I ran the following piece of code on the windows cmd :

$java -cp . myProgram > output.txt

I could do the same in unix bash.

My question is the following:

• How is it that > and output.txt are not passed as an argument to myProgram ?

• What if I wanted my program to receive > as an argument?

Answer 1

The metacharacter > is processed by the shell, and this character and the following filename are not included in the arguments when running the program. If you want it to be passed literally to the program, you need to quote it.

java -cp . myProgram ">" output.txt