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.txtThe Explanation
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 > .nvmrcSo I get a .nvmrc file with the node version I’m running!