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 wo

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

the credit goes for my senior colleague for this:

:> filename

This will not break log files, so you can even use it on syslog, for example.

Answer 3

You have the noclobber option set. The error looks like it's from csh, so you would do:

cat /dev/null >! file

If I'm wrong and you are using bash, you should do:

cat /dev/null >| file

in bash, you can also shorten that to:

>| file