That’s a Unix thing. At the command line, any shell, it does mean pipe — but that’s the only place. I’d always say to customers on the phone “then type the pipe symbol — the broken vertical bar. It’s usually over the right hand return if you use SHIFT with it.”

And they’d grunt at me :)

Note: It was as broken vertical bar in olden times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_bar#Solid_vertical_bar_vs_broken_bar says:

Many early video terminals and dot-matrix printers rendered the vertical bar character as the allograph broken bar ¦. This may have been to distinguish the character from the lower-case ‘L’ and the upper-case ‘I’ on these limited-resolution devices, and to make a vertical line of them look more like a horizontal line of dashes. It was also (briefly) part of the ASCII standard.