Question

How to type the character > or < in the console?

Posted August 29, 2014 4.6k views

Is there any way to write some special character like > or < in the console? I can’T find a way to do it.

To the question: “Why are you using the console, it’s for emergency access only?” Well, bingo, it IS an emergency and I need to access the droplet from work where it’s simply impossible to run putty behind the highly secured proxy. And I need to type a command at the console with the pipe >> but can’t. :-(

Any hint?

Thanks

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kinwolf
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kinwolf

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2 answers
Captain August 29, 2014

Well, if you’re editing a file which has this signs in you could use quotes to specify that the whole string is the filename:

nano "index.php <"
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asb August 29, 2014

What keyboard layout are you using? It’s possible that there is an issue with the droplet defaulting to a US-EN layout, while you’re using something else. Please try runing:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-data
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  • kinwolf August 29, 2014

    Tried that, and made sure canadian-multilingual was selected(my usual keyboard) That was horrible, the keyboard was all screwed up(I got mulitple keys that would display the “È” character instead of what they were supposed to display). So I went back to US keyboard which seems to be the default of the droplet indeed. The characters I cannot get are all the characters that requires the ALT key. Like < is ALT-comma and > is ALT-period

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