Empty Contents of a Specified File Without Deleting via the Command Line
May 7, 2012 - 3 Comments
If you’re working at the command line and need to quickly empty the contents of a file, throw a greater than symbol and a space in front of the filename like so:
> filename
All content within the target file will be immediately removed without warning, leaving it blank while retaining the files existence, filename, and permissions. This is often preferable and quicker than manually deleting and recreating a file.
A good practical example is for clearing out the contents of log files, for example:
> ~/Library/Logs/updates.log
You can also use this command to create a new 0 byte file at the location, similar to using the touch command.
Nice tip.
this is a great idea if a file is being held open for writing, rather than stop the process and delete the file and restart the process.
Interestingly, I messed around with this a bit this morning and found that it was unable to delete .textClipping file content. I made a file in nano, and gave it the .textClipping extension and it did remove the contents of the file…
Strange…