As you may have noticed, many programs that you use constantly refer to the ^C character. You may have wondered what this was. Whenever you see a carat (^) followed by a character, generally, it refers to holding down the CONTROL Key of the keyboard and hitting the character specified. The Control Key is generally located on the lower left of the keyboard as well as the lower right of the typewriter section of the keyboard (next to the arrow keys).

The PC Keyboard: The Control Key may be labeled with an abbreviated Ctrl instead of the full Control.

The Macintosh Keyboard: The Control key is rarely used in common Macintosh applications. It will be used if you use Telnet to access a remote machine.