How to empty truncate a file on linux that already exists and is protected in someway

Question

I have a file called error log on my server that I need to frequently truncate  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  gt  error log   I get the message  File already exists    Obviously there is some kind of configuration done on the server to prevent accidental overriding of files  Can anybody tell how do I  truncate  the file in a single command

User · Answer

false tee fileToTruncate   may work as well

User · Answer

I do like this  cp  dev null file

User · Answer

the credit goes for my senior colleague for this     gt  filename   This will not break log files  so you can even use it on syslog  for example

User · Answer

Any one can try this command to truncate any file in linux system  This will surely work in any format    truncate -s 0 file txt

User · Answer

You can also use function truncate   truncate -s0 yourfile   if permission denied  use sudo   sudo truncate -s0 yourfile   Help Manual  man truncate  tested on ubuntu Linux

User · Answer

Since sudo will not work with redirection  gt   I like the tee command for this purpose   echo      sudo tee fileName

User · Answer

This will be enough to set the file size to 0    gt  error log

User · Answer

You have the noclobber option set   The error looks like it s from csh  so you would do   cat  dev null  gt   file   If I m wrong and you are using bash  you should do   cat  dev null  gt   file   in bash  you can also shorten that to    gt   file

User · Answer

You can try also   echo -n  gt   my file

[linux] How to empty ("truncate") a file on linux that already exists and is protected in someway?

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