'^' acts an escape character on the CMD command line, a little like '\' under unix, but much more limited. The only characters that it escapes are a few characters that the CLI otherwise treats specially.

These are  | < > % ^

Used, outside of double quotes, it prevents the command line from treating these characters as pipes, io-redirection or the start of an environment variable substitution respectively, as well as escaping itself.

A simple demonstration. 

P:\test>perl -e"print qq[($_)] for @ARGV" ^| ^< ^> ^% ^^
(|)(<)(>)(%)(^)

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In reply to Re: Windows command line by BrowserUk
in thread Windows command line by dda

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