[bash] Write to file, but overwrite it if it exists

echo "text" >> 'Users/Name/Desktop/TheAccount.txt'

How do I make it so it creates the file if it doesn't exist, but overwrites it if it already exists. Right now this script just appends.

If you have output that can have errors, you may want to use an ampersand and a greater than, as follows:

my_task &> 'Users/Name/Desktop/task_output.log' this will redirect both stderr and stdout to the log file (instead of stdout only).

#!/bin/bash

cat <<EOF > SampleFile

Put Some text here 
Put some text here
Put some text here

EOF

If your environment doesn't allow overwriting with >, use pipe | and tee instead as follows:

echo "text" | tee 'Users/Name/Desktop/TheAccount.txt'

Note this will also print to the stdout. In case this is unwanted, you can redirect the output to /dev/null as follows:

echo "text" | tee 'Users/Name/Desktop/TheAccount.txt' > /dev/null

To overwrite one file's content to another file. use cat eg.

echo  "this is foo" > foobar.txt
cat foobar.txt

echo "this is bar" > bar.txt
cat bar.txt

Now to overwrite foobar we can use a cat command as below

cat bar.txt >> foobar.txt
cat foobar.txt

Just noting that if you wish to redirect both stderr and stdout to a file while you have noclobber set (i.e. set -o noclobber), you can use the code:

cmd >| file.txt 2>&1

More information about this can be seen at https://stackoverflow.com/a/876242.

Also this answer's @TuBui's question on the answer @BrDaHa provided above at Aug 9 '18 at 9:34.

In Bash, if you have set noclobber a la set -o noclobber, then you use the syntax >|

For example:

echo "some text" >| existing_file

This also works if the file doesn't exist yet

• Check if noclobber is set with: set -o | grep noclobber

• For a more detailed explanation on this special type of operator, see this post

• For a more exhaustive list of redirection operators, refer to this post

Despite NylonSmile's answer, which is "sort of" correct.. I was unable to overwrite files, in this manner..

echo "i know about Pipes, girlfriend" > thatAnswer

zsh: file exists: thatAnswer

to solve my issues.. I had to use... >!, á la..

[[ $FORCE_IT == 'YES' ]] && echo "$@" >! "$X" || echo "$@" > "$X"

Obviously, be careful with this...