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Jerry Feldman <gaf at h0020780e341c.ne.client2.attbi.com> writes: > On Thu, 6 Feb 2003 22:29:15 -0500 > Derek Martin <blu at sophic.org> wrote: > > > One method to do this regardless of how your shell handles redirection > > and what flavor of echo you have is this: > > > > rm filename; touch filename > I fully concur with Derek. This is full portable accross all versions of > Unix and Linux. As mentioned in the other posts, echo, while a shell > builtin may have different behavior depending on the shell. But it doesn't do the same thing. The other examples truncate the existing file, this doesn't. It's possible this makes a difference. One of the reasons you might be doing this is to reclaim disk space. If a process has the file open, truncating it still reclaims the space, deleting it doesn't. Or, perhaps you know that something is doing the equivalent of "tail -f" on the file, and another process is appending to it. If you delete and recreate, those processes are not talking to each other any more. I think "cat > filename", then ^d is probably the shortest portable way. (or echo -n > filename is you're not interactive). jj
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