Dereference operator
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The dereference operator or indirection operator, "*", is a unary operator found in C-like languages that include pointer variables. It operates on a pointer variable, and returns an l-value equivalent to the value at the pointer address. This is called "dereferencing" the pointer. The following is an example:
int x = 0; int *pointer_to_x = &x; (*pointer_to_x) += 1;
The above C code increments the variable x by using the indirection operator and a pointer to the variable x.