This reminds me of when I tried to write HTML code in bash.

    <html> hi </html> a

This code when run as a bash script reads from a file with name "html" and writes to file "hi". It also reads from file "html" (in the root directory) and writes to a file called "a". The "a" in the end is just to avoid bash errors about unexpected newline.

When I played with this a few years ago I actually discovered a bug in bash. If I had a bash alias with the same name as one of the filenames, bash would do alias expansion on the filename. This bug was triggered by executing a line with two redirection operators before any command.

So if you follow these steps:

    $ alias a='abc xyz'

    $ </ >a

you would get the error (in addition to a file created with name "abc"):

    bash: xyz: command not found

This happened because bash expanded the second line to:

    $ </ >abc xyz

and therefore treated "xyz" as a command (and "abc" and the root directory as filenames). This bug doesn't work anymore in new versions of bash because it has been fixed.