Less-than sign

The correct title of this article is <. It appears incorrectly here because of technical restrictions.

For the use of the "<" sign as punctuation, see Bracket#Uses of "<" and ">".

The less-than sign is a sign of inequality.

Computing

The less-than sign (<) is an original ASCII character (hex 3C, decimal 60).

Programming language

In BASIC, Lisp-family languages, and C-family languages (including Java and C++), operator < means "less than".

In Coldfusion, operator .lt. means "less than".

In Fortran, operator .LT. means "less than"; later versions allow <.

In Bourne shell, operator -lt means "less than".

Double less-than sign

In Bash, Perl, Ruby, operator <<EOF is used to denote the beginning of a heredoc statement.

In C++, operator <<, when applied on an output stream, acts as insertion operator and performs an output operation on the stream.

Triple less-than sign

In PHP, operator <<<OUTPUT is used to denote the beginning of a heredoc statement (where OUTPUT is an arbitrary named variable.)

Less-than sign plus equals sign

The less-than sign plus the equals sign (<=) is used for an approximation of the less-than-or-equal-to sign (≤). ASCII does not have less-than-or-equal-to sign.

In BASIC, Lisp-family languages, and C-family languages (including Java and C++), operator <= means "less than or equal to".

In Fortran, operator .LE. means "less than or equal to".

In Bourne shell and Windows PowerShell, operator -le means "less than or equal to".

Shell scripts

In Bourne shell (and many other shells), less-than sign is used to redirect input from a file. Less-than plus ampersand (<&) is used to redirect from a file descriptor.

Spaceship operator

Less-than sign is used in the spaceship operator.

HTML

In HTML (and SGML and XML), the less-than sign is used at the beginning of tags. The less-than sign may be included with &lt;.

See also

• Greater-than sign
• Relational operator
• Much-less-than sign