The magic characters like <, >, and | in command lines like

myprogram.exe | sort > output.txt

are interpreted by the command interpreter CMD.EXE; they aren’t built into the CreateProcess function. (This is obvious if you think about it. That command line created two processes; which one should CreateProcess return a handle to?)

If you pass a command line like this to CreateProcess, it will merely run the myprogram.exe program with the command line arguments “| sort > output.txt“. (The ShellExecute function behaves similarly.) If you want these characters to be interpreted as redirection operators, you need to give them to someone who will interpret those characters in the manner you intend:

cmd.exe /C myprogram.exe | sort > output.txt

Since different command line interpreters use different syntax, you have to specify which command line interpreter you want to use.

If the command line came from the user, you probably want to use the COMSPEC variable in order to give the command to the user’s command line interpreter of choice.