Home / server / Questions / 63799
Accepted
Jakub Arnold
Asked: 2009-09-10 07:12:21 +0800 CST

How to 'echo "" > x' on multiple files

  • 772

What is the best way how to empty a bunch of files in bash? As far I've been doing this

echo "" > development.log
echo "" > production.log

I don't really want to delete those files, so rm is not possible. I've tried many things like

echo "" > *.log

but nothing worked.

bash

7 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You don't need the echo. Just

    >filename

    will empty the file. To edit rassie...

    for FILE in *.log
do
   >"${FILE}"
done

    The quotes and brackets are preferred, as they will correctly handle files with spaces or special characters in them.

    • 11

  2. Just for fun, another variation combining Eric Dennis' find with everybody else's redirection:

    find . -name "*.log" -exec sh -c ">{}" \;
    • 3 
  3. for i in *.log; do > $i; done

    Note that if you really want the files to be emptied you have to use no echo at all, see above, or pass echo the -n flag (echo -n)

    • 1 
  4. for i in *.log; do cp /dev/null $i; done

    Or, if you want to recurse:

    find . -name "*.log" -exec cp /dev/null {} \;
    • 1

  5. A loop could do:

    for i in *.log; do echo "" > $i; done
    • 0

  6. Solution:

    echo -n | tee *.log

    Explanation:

    echo -n echoes an empty string to stdout; while tee *.log writes stdout to mutiple files with widecard like you wished.

    • 0

  7. This will also work.

    find *.txt | awk '{print " " > $1}'
    • -1