How to type pipe (|)
Also called vertical bar, vertical line, or symbol.
Hold Shift with your left little finger and press the backslash key with your right little finger, above Enter on a US keyboard.
Which finger types |
- Finger
- Right pinky
- Resting position
- ; on the home row
- Shift
- Required, held by the other hand
- Hand
- right
No website can detect which finger you actually used — a browser reports the character, not the hand that produced it. The finger above is the one the standard touch typing layout assigns, and it is the one the lessons here train.
What | is used for
- Sends one command's output into another in a shell, as in ls | grep txt.
- Means “or” in most programming languages, written doubled as ||.
- Separates alternatives in a regular expression.
- Draws column borders in a Markdown table.
Where it comes from
Douglas McIlroy proposed the shell pipe at Bell Labs in 1973, and the idea that small programs should chain into larger ones through it became the defining principle of Unix. The character was already on the keyboard; the concept it now names was named after the plumbing metaphor, not the other way round.
The mistake people make
Confusing it with a lowercase L or a capital I in a monospaced font. In a password or a command they are visually near-identical, and this is a frequent cause of a copied command that fails for no apparent reason.
If the key is missing or gives the wrong character
- Windows: hold Alt and type 124 on the numeric keypad.
- UK keyboards: often Shift and the key beside the left Shift.
Practise it properly
Knowing which finger owns a key is not the same as using it without thinking. The Typometer course blocks on the wrong key and names the finger for every one, so the habit forms rather than the knowledge.
Other keys
Related guides
Free, and no account needed.
- Start at level 1: the home rowFind F and J without looking, one key at a time.
- How to learn touch typingWhat actually works, what to ignore, and how long it takes.
- The full typing course415 levels from the home row to code and professional documents.
- Untimed typing practicePractise without a clock and focus on the keys you keep missing.