UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

A REAL dummy question:

could someone explain to me the specifics of the <, >, >> and | symbols as they are used in Unix shells? I'm taking a bit of a crash course in this matter, and I feel this is very much a basic.

I know that | is the pipe, meaning that it will tunnel the output of the command before it to the command after it, as e.g.

man du |_more

and all kinds of intricate variations. What do the other ... things do, and how do I call them?

(oh, I work on OSX for the moment. Yep, that figures )

There are numerous tutorials on the 'net for stuff like this. Here's one: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/unix3.html.

Also, note the unix.com rules as well, in particular the one pertaining to classroom problems.

Thanks for the reply.
To clear things up: this is not a homework problem, seeing as how I left high school and college some time ago. I'm going through a self-imposed crash course, to deal with the holes in my basic Unix/Linux knowledge.

OIC, good luck then. At least you don't have to deal with graded tests!

Briefly,
> send the output to a file
>> appends the output to a file

So:
echo one > myfile
echo two >> myfile
results in two lines in myfile. While:
echo three > myfile
will result in one line in output file.

And if you what to view the file, one way would be:
cat < myfile
since < specifies an input file.

Think of the arrows as showing the flow of data.

There is a lot more to them, but this is a start.