After entering a command line and pressing RETURN, it will be analyzed.

Characters that have a special meaning:
 ; separates multiple commands
 | separates multiple commands with  piping  output/input
 > output  redirection 
 < input  redirection 
 " quote

If you want to use one of these characters in a normal way, like in a
filename, you have to precede it by  or you have to enclose the whole
argument in quotes. If you want to have a  before these special
characters, you have to type \ .

Example:                   a;b\|c<d
This will be converted to  a;b|c<d

The ; is for multiple commands in one command line. Example:
  dir ram:;info;echo Done^J

Quotes can be used to surround arguments. Inside the quotes no parsing
is done. This way you can have arguments which contain spaces. Every
opening quote must be followed by a closing quote. Example:
  dir "ram disk:"
  echo "one; two; three"