• 4am@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      .“:>>” is “append null” right? Do you get a file with a single ASCII NUL or is it truly empty?

      • Not really. I believe : is the “true” builtin. So it’s like running a program that exits with zero and writes nothing to stdout. The >> streams the empty stdout into the named file.

      • al177
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        1 year ago

        $ :|wc -c 0 $ touch /tmp/f; :>>/tmp/f; wc -c /tmp/f 0 /tmp/f

      • owsei@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Yeah!

        it’s basically a noop, I use it as a placeholder when I’m writing a script, since bash doesn’t accept code blocks with no commands