bash command XOR ^ anothercommand

Question

In the example below:

w ^ ls

what's the expected behaviour of the XOR operator in shell?

So when we enter

command ^ anothercommand

what triggers anothercommand to run (if it will execute at all)?

Solution 1

If you enter command ^ anothercommand, you are simply providing command with two arguments, ^ and anothercommand. There is no operator here. anothercommand will only run if command decides to treat that argument as a command name and attempt to run it.

Solution 2

As you can see in man bash, ^ is not used to separate commands, it's used inside arithmetic expressions.

$ echo $(( 5 ^ 9 ))
12

That's because

dec     bin
 5     0101
 9     1001
-----------
12     1100