Caret

1. Another name for a cursor.
2. Also known as the circumflex, the caret is the symbol "^" above the 6 key on a standard United States qwerty keyboard. The caret is used in mathematics to represent a square, cube, or other power. For example, 6^3, which may also be represented as 6³ or 6 * 6 * 6. Carets are also used in different programming languages for various reasons. For example, in Perl, a user may use the below line to replace the first character in the variable "myvariable" with an uppercase character.
   
   $myvariable =~ s/^(\w)/\U$1/g;
   
   In C-style programming languages the caret is used for a bitwise XOR.
   
   
3. Many times documentation and/or information from Computer Hope and other computer related documentation may list commands such as ^X, ^C, ^Z, etc. this means CTRL-X, CTRL-C, CTRL-Z, etc. In other words, a user would want to press and hold the CONTROL or CTRL key and then press the letter following the caret.

• An additional listing of computer keyboard keys can be found by clicking here.

Also see: Cursor, Keyboard definitions