what does this dereference operator in front of function name do?

Question

I haven't found any mention of this anywhere. There is a dereference operator in a function name like this:

char *func()
{
   //code
}

what is the purpose of that * operator?

Answer 1

You are not actually dereferencing anything, the * is part of the return type. The compiler doesn't really care about where you place the *, so your code is equivalent to writing

char* func() { }

In other words it means that func() returns a char pointer.

Answer 2

This is not a dereference operator, applied to the function, but function, returning pointer to a char.