Timeline for Difference between cat and '>' to zero out a file

6 events

when toggle format	what		by	license	comment
May 23, 2017 at 12:39	history	edited	CommunityBot		replaced http://stackoverflow.com/ with https://stackoverflow.com/
May 20, 2014 at 14:53	comment	added	jw013		There is a time and a place for everything. Your information may be useful in some other context but it does not belong here - you should find a more appropriate place for it because nobody trying to rotate logs is going to look in this completely unrelated redirection question. Here your answer is the equivalent of a digital weed, just as an otherwise useful pumpkin plant in the middle of a cornfield would be considered a weed.
May 20, 2014 at 7:29	comment	added	Olivier Dulac		@jw013: True! But I just wanted to take the question's opportunity to re-state the "what you want/not what you want" information, as it's not very well known, and could hit hard someone trying to rotate logs (a common case where you want to truncate a file).
May 19, 2014 at 17:05	comment	added	jw013		Very little of this answer actually is relevant to or answers the question. The difference between a `cat /dev/null > file` and a `> file` is a `cat /dev/null` and that makes no difference to the file.
May 19, 2014 at 16:26	history	edited	Olivier Dulac	CC BY-SA 3.0	added 35 characters in body
May 19, 2014 at 16:21	history	answered	Olivier Dulac	CC BY-SA 3.0