^

This character (called a circumflex accent, or a hat) is used in conjunction
with a capital letter (A through Z) to display a control character on the
screen. For example, a control S might be displayed as ^S, or as S^. See the
CTRL_KEY definition for information about entering control characters from
the keyboard. See the ASCII 000-031 definition for a list of the control 
characters.

^  in a command line will causes the next input character to be treated as 
text (in OS/2 only), whatever that character may be. For example, ^> will 
NOT cause redirection to occur, since the ">" after the "^" is treated as 
just another text character, rather than the redirection symbol. Since the 
"^" can be used to escape the normal consequences associated with using 
another character, OS/2 documents call it an "escape" character. It should 
not be confused with ASCII 027, the ESC control character.
