">" (or "<") is the redirection operator. If it is not preceded by a number (the file designator) then it defaults to standard output (>) or standard input (<)
example:
cat filename|[some command] >newfilename
This takes data from filename and runs it thru [some command] and then send the output to newfilename.
using input redirection, it looks like this:
[some command] <filename >newfilename
(Note that it is more common to enclose metadata in <>, but that would really be confusing when describing the < and > operators)
To run a command and direct the output to a file and trash the errors:
[some command] 1>filename 2>/dev/null
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