What does the ampersand indicate in this bash command 1>&2

Question

Quick one, 2>&1 redirects stderr to stdout, but what does the ampersand mean? I know if we had 2 > 1 it would output to a file named

Answer 1

The ampersand doesn't do anything - it's the character in the 2>&1 operator rather than being a thing in its own right.

bash supports several redirection operators, the 2>&1 operator or the &> operator tie together the streams of the process before or after redirection.