What does the < (left chevron / triangle bracket) do? [duplicate]

The operator < is most commonly used to redirect file contents. For example

grep "something" < /path/to/input.file > /path/to/output.file 

This would grep the contents of input.file, outputting lines containing "something" to output.file

It is not a full 'inverse' operator of the > operator, but it is in a limited sense with respect to files.

For a really good and brief description, along with other applications of < see io redirection

Update: to answer your question in the comments here is how you can work with file descriptors with bash using the < operator:

You can add additional inputs and/or outputs beyond stdin (0), stdout (1) and stderr (2) to a bash environment, which is sometimes more convenient than constantly switching where you are redirecting output. The #'s in the () next to the 3 'std' inputs/outputs in bash are their 'file descriptors' although they are rarely referred to in that way in bash - more often in C, but even then there are constants defined which abstract things away from those numbers, e.g. STDOUT_FILENO is defined as 1 in unistd.h - or stdlib.h...

Lets say you have a script that is already using stdin and stdout for interfacing with a user's terminal. You can then open additional files for reading, writing, or both, without impacting the stdin / stdout streams. Here's a simple example; basically the same type of material that was in the tldp.org link above.

#!/bin/bash - #open a file for reading, assign it FD 3 exec 3</path/to/input.file #open another file for writing, assign it FD 4 exec 4>/path/to/output.file #and a third, for reading and writing, with FD 6 (it's not recommended to use FD 5) exec 6<>/path/to/inputoutput.file #Now we can read stuff in from 3 places - FD 0 - stdin; FD 3; input.file and FD 6, inputoutput.file # and write to 4 streams - stdout, FD 1, stderr, FD 2, output.file, FD 4 and inputoutput.file, FD 6 # search for "something" in file 3 and put the number found in file 4 grep -c "something" <&3 >&4 # count the number of times "thisword" is in file 6, and append that number to file 6 grep -c "thisword" <&6 >>&6 # redirect stderr to file 3 for rest of script exec 2>>&3 #close the files 3<&- 4<&- 6<&- # also - there was no use of cat in this example. I'm now a UUOC convert. 

I hope it makes more sense now - you really have to play around with it a bit for it to sink. Just remember the POSIX mantra - everything is a file. So when people say that < is really only applicable on files, its not that limiting an issue in Linux / Unix; if something isn't a file, you can easily make it look and act like one.