Minimal linear codes have interesting applications in secret sharing schemes and secure two-party computation. This paper uses characteristic functions of some subsets of Fqto construct minimal linear codes. By properties of characteristic functions, we can obtain more minimal binary linear codes from known minimal binary linear codes, which generalizes results of Ding et al. [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 64, no. 10, pp. 6536-6545, 2018]. By characteristic functions corresponding to some subspaces of Fq, we obtain many minimal linear codes, which generalizes results of [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 64, no. 10, pp. 6536-6545, 2018] and [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 65, no. 11, pp. 7067-7078, 2019]. Finally, we use characteristic functions to present a characterization of minimal linear codes from the defining set method and present a class of minimal linear codes.