Write to file, but overwrite it if it exists

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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).

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

#!/bin/bash

cat <<EOF > SampleFile

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

EOF

Answer 5

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...

Answer 6

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