Pipe to file overwrite

If you have output that can have errors, you may want to use an ampersand and a greater than, as follows:. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow.

Learn more. Write to file, but overwrite it if it exists Ask Question. Asked 11 years ago. Active 2 months ago. Viewed k times. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Community Bot 1 1 1 silver badge. Nylon Smile Nylon Smile 7, 1 1 gold badge 22 22 silver badges 32 32 bronze badges. Some environments disallow with something like -bash: TheAccount.

See answer by BrDaHa. It works on Ubuntu Semi-related question to this, but what's the best way to pick up all these little nuances about bash? I never knew about this answer but it's hugely helpful. I'm finding it hard to figure out a middle ground between "just absorb the bash reference manual cover to cover" and "googling every problem on Stackoverflow.

This answer doesn't directly answer the question. As Jake noted, BrDaHa answer answers it. Show Threads. Show Posts. Registered User. Join Date: Mar Join Date: Sep Yes, that is because you can't pipe data out of a file and back into itself as you are trying to do. It gives an error because you can't have a file send its contents to itself, overwriting the data it is ending out. If you want to replace the original file, you pipe the data to a temporary file.

When that operation is over, you then replace the original with the temporary file. If kernel designers allowd file descriptors to act as you are wanted to do with one operation, file systems would be corrupted extremely easily, files operations could be circular and grow without limits, etc.

There are complexities with file descriptor management and interprocess pipelining. Simple is good, robust and elegant. What you are hoping to do is better done in two shell operations, not one. Find all posts by Neo. Join Date: Oct Then it sounds like you are using csh or tcsh as your shell. In this case you have two options to force the overwriting of a file. The first choice will affect all subsequent redirects in your current login. Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.

Feedback will be sent to Microsoft: By pressing the submit button, your feedback will be used to improve Microsoft products and services. Privacy policy. Thank you. The Out-File cmdlet sends output to a file. It implicitly uses PowerShell's formatting system to write to the file.

The file receives the same display representation as the terminal. This means that the output may not be ideal for programmatic processing unless all input objects are strings. This example shows how to send a list of the local computer's processes to a file.

If the file does not exist, Out-File creates the file in the specified path. The Get-Process cmdlet gets the list of processes running on the local computer.

The Process objects are sent down the pipeline to the Out-File cmdlet. Out-File uses the FilePath parameter and creates a file in the current directory named Process. The Get-Content command gets content from the file and displays it in the PowerShell console.

This example prevents an existing file from being overwritten. By default, Out-File overwrites existing files. Out-File uses the FilePath parameter and attempts to write to a file in the current directory named Process. The NoClobber parameter prevents the file from being overwritten and displays a message that the file already exists.

The Width parameter limits each line in the file to 50 characters so some data might be truncated. This example shows how to use the Out-File cmdlet when you are not in a FileSystem provider drive. Use the Get-PSProvider cmdlet to view the providers on your local computer.

The Set-Location command uses the Path parameter to set the current location to the registry provider Alias:. The Get-Location cmdlet displays the complete path for Alias:.