Zero out log file

Improve this question. Restart the server. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Then do whatever you want with the original file. No restart necessary. Improve this answer. The Overflow Blog. Stack Gives Back Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. It is a null operation that exists to expand commandline args. LOL, "cat abuse" — KM. No true is not required to be builtin and it traditionally wasn't. POSIX even mentions that : may be more efficient than true on some systems.

Show 8 more comments. That's inspired from the similar feature in t csh Redirections were initially not performed for : in UnixV7 as : was interpreted half-way between a comment leader and a null command. Later they were and like for all builtins, if the redirection fails, that exits the shell. Interestingly, in t csh , that's defining a null label for goto , so goto '' there would branch there.

If the redirection fails, that exits the shell. If file is a symlink to an non-existing file however, some cp implementations like GNU's will refuse to create it. Also the question I'll ask when reading that and most shells will complain about the same is what output exactly are you redirecting? So that reads straight away as generating an empty file. What is meant here? Copies the content of the empty file to file. Makes sense, though someone not knowing how cp is meant to do by default might think you're trying to make file a null device as well.

Runs nothing and redirects its output to a file. Makes sense to me. Strange that it's not a common idiom. So, how do you empty a file in Linux? How to clear a file from all of its content without deleting the actual file? There are several ways you can empty a file without actually deleting the file. Let me show you some of these methods. When you use -s 0, it means you adjusted the file size to 0 bytes. The simplest way to empty a file is to use the command below.

If the file is not in use, it will work in Bash:. Another way to empty a file is via echo command in Linux :. If your aim was to clear log files and make some free space, you should learn about cleaning journald logs. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.

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