I have a file called error.log on my server that I need to truncate frequently. I have rw permissions for the file. Opening the file in vi > deleting all content > saving works (obviously). But when I try the below
cat /dev/null > error.log
I get the message
File already exists.
Obviously, the server has some configuration to prevent accidental file overriding. Can anybody tell me how to "truncate" the file in a single command?
You have the noclobber option set. The error looks like it's from csh, so you would do:
cat /dev/null >! file
If I'm wrong and you are using bash, you should do:
cat /dev/null >| file
in bash, you can also shorten that to:
>| file