Overwriting a given file with "0"
 

Hi,
I want to overwrite a set of files with the character "0" in order to delete their contents. For individual files I can do -
However for multiple files in a particular directory if I try the following -
the files are not getting overwritten. Any suggestions?

You can also overwrite a file with 0 this way: /dev/zero > /path/to/file.

Or, overwrite it with nothing: /dev/null > /path/to/file (leave an empty file).

So, maybe this would work: find . -type f -name "*\.log" -exec /dev/zero > {} \;

Hi
Thanks for the prompt reply!
/dev/null > /path/to/file doesn't seem to be working on my system. So I tried -
cp /dev/null > /path/to/file
This time it worked.
So I did
$ find . -type f -name "*\.log" -exec cp /dev/null {} \;
Thanks once again,:-)

You can't do what you're trying to do because your command is ambiguous. Exactly which command does the '>' apply to? You want it to apply to the echo. The shell is applying it to the find command.

To accomplish what you want, you should create a simple script. Something like:
name the script whatever you like, make it executable, and then reformat your find command to something like:
EDIT: Or, as you posted, change the command to use some way other than output redirection.

Thanks Dark_helmet,
I tried out your suggestion and created a script to echo the "0" to the name entered as the first argument. Then used that script (after chmod +x) with the find command. And it worked.