How to type Ctrl-^?

Question

I'm a bit embarrassed of asking this, but how to make the ^ (I can't see it in my keyboard).

I want to do this: CTRL-^

Answer 1

The ^ character (which looks like an inverted V) is known as caret. It's also known as a hat, control or uparrow.

It's Shift+6 on my UK keyboard, and I think it's the same for US layouts as well, so you could try Ctrl+Shift+6

If you have a different layout you could have a look at this page on Wikipedia which has pictures of many different keyboard layouts.

If you're on Windows you can get a ^ by hold down Alt and typing 094 on your numeric keypad which will work for all layouts, but unfortunately this won't work if you're holding down Ctrl

Answer 2

According to Wikipedia:

Control characters are often rendered into a printable form known as caret notation by printing a caret (^) and then the ASCII character that has a value of the control character plus 64. Control characters generated using letter keys are thus displayed with the upper-case form of the letter. For example, ^G represents code 7, which is generated by pressing the G key when the control key is held down.

As "^" is ASCII 94 (decimal), "Ctrl-^" might represent ASCII 30. Hence, holding down Alt and typing 30 on the numeric keypad might do the trick to "type" Ctrl-^?

Answer 3

I think that (in a terminal under linux) you can hit ctrl-v ctrl-^.

ctrl-v is by default bound to:

quote-insert
      Add the next character typed to the line verbatim.  This is  how
      to insert characters like C-q, for example.

In order to verify my claim I used xxd (xxd - make a hexdump or do the reverse.) which comes with vim. I typed the following keys: 'xxd<enter><ctrl-v><ctrl-^><ctrl-d><ctrl-d>' (without the quotes) and the result looked like:

% xxd
^^
0000000: 1e                                      .

Now the explanation is a little complicated:

• xxd should be obvious.

• sends a 0x1e. In order to understand this you have to remember that ctrl-x sends the character code of X (0x58, note: capital X) minus 0x40, that is 0x18. In case of ^ (0x5e) this results in 0x01e

• terminates the input. (I don't know why I had to type it twice though).

And finally man ascii is really helpful in remembering all those character codes.

Answer 4

Press Ctrl+Shift+6. The ^ usually represents the Ctrl key, [ie ^C for a Keyboard Interrupt], but in this case, I think the ^ represents a literal caret.