Its possible use special characters in a shell function name?

Question

I have to create the function in shell script, that function name must contain the special characters. like

     >()
      {
       echo $1 $2
      }

Here my function name is >, If its possible how can I give, Like above I tried that But it will through the error

This is probably an [XY problem](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem/66378#66378). Why do you need a function called `>`? — jofel, Mar 25 '15 at 10:20
@jofel I need to add the function in bashrc file, when redirection symbol is occur on my terminal window I need to call that function. — Bhuvanesh, Mar 25 '15 at 10:24
We are getting closer. Can you elaborate more? Do you need this for debugging? `bash` accepts only one argument after `>` so why do you use `$1` and `$2`? The answer to your actually question is probably actually *no*, but it is not yet clear what you really want to achieve. — jofel, Mar 25 '15 at 10:31
Please [edit] your question and explain what your final objective is. What exactly do you want to achieve with this function? Calling a function `>` is not a solution, if you explain what you are trying to do, we might be able to help you find another way. — terdon, Mar 25 '15 at 12:52

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:29

Most shells restrict the name of functions to contain only characters that don't need to be quoted, which excludes >.

Even in the few shells that allow > as a function name (I only know of zsh), defining a function called > would only have an effect if you called > as a command (which would require quoting it, i.e. running \> or ">" or '>'). It would not change how redirection works.

None of the usual shells have a way to configure what happens if some subsequent part of the script performs a redirection. If you need that kind of things, a shell is not nearly a flexible enough language. But there's probably a better way to solve whatever problem you're trying to solve — and quite possibly one that can be solved in a shell script.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 25 '15 at 10:35

The > has a special meaning in the shell, it's a redirection operator, see the manpage:

[n]> file Redirect standard output (or n) to file.

The name of a function can contain only letters (a-z or A-Z), digit (0-9) or the underscore character (_). Also is must not begin with a digit. (see Function Definition Command and Name)

Its possible use special characters in a shell function name?

2 Answers2

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