52
If you create a man page
(lemmy.zip)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
It depends on how the document is written, but \> stops matching on a period, comma, apostrophe, space, newline, what have you. Word boundary matching is just very handy.
As to why its that set of characters.... Honestly I have no idea :) Regexes are just what they are and I assume the special escape made sense to the inventor at least.