Fun Code Snippets

I keep looking up how to do little command-line code tricks (for fun) so I figure I should probably start writing them down somewhere so I can just look them up on my own site.

Create a File That Contains a CLI Response

Sure, I'm super familiar with creating a file with touch and I always forget "how do you echo to a file, or append to a file?"

This came from wanting to add a .nvmrc file to this blog, as I was a little overzealous in upgrading and the upgrade broke deployment. Meh.

The Snippets

touch file.txt

echo >> file.txt

> file.txt

The Explanation

Lifted from StackExchange

With both > file and echo >> file, the shell creates the file if it didn't already exist.

With > file, the file is truncated if it already existed. No command was specified, so nothing gets written to the file and the file will be empty.

echo, without any arguments, prints an empty line. So the output contains the line ending character, typically linefeed (LF, \n):

My Use

node --version > .nvmrc

So I get a .nvmrc file with the node version I'm running!