Its possible use special characters in a shell function name?

Question

I have to create the function in shell script, that function name must contain the special characters. like

     >()
      {
       echo $1 $2
      }

Here my function name is >, If its possible how can I give, Like above I tried that But it will through the error

Answer 1

Most shells restrict the name of functions to contain only characters that don't need to be quoted, which excludes >.

Even in the few shells that allow > as a function name (I only know of zsh), defining a function called > would only have an effect if you called > as a command (which would require quoting it, i.e. running \> or ">" or '>'). It would not change how redirection works.

None of the usual shells have a way to configure what happens if some subsequent part of the script performs a redirection. If you need that kind of things, a shell is not nearly a flexible enough language. But there's probably a better way to solve whatever problem you're trying to solve — and quite possibly one that can be solved in a shell script.

Answer 2

The > has a special meaning in the shell, it's a redirection operator, see the manpage:

[n]> file Redirect standard output (or n) to file.

The name of a function can contain only letters (a-z or A-Z), digit (0-9) or the underscore character (_). Also is must not begin with a digit. (see Function Definition Command and Name)