vim special character "^\"

I opened a file in VI and I see a few instances of "^\" What exactly开发者_开发百科 is this character?

Thanks

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Seems to be a file-separator ASCII character from the ASCII table.

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After poking around on Google, it sounds like it generally sends a quit signal (depending on the machine you're on). See the stty command to determine what it's mapped to on your box. It also has an unexpected and useful effect when using ping, see this blog post.