ambiguous redirect issues

[drewrockshard]

I am in a test environment (of shell scripts - that's just something I had lying around) trying to clean out the contents of files. The overall reasoning behind this is:

If I have an abundant amount of log files that are taking up large amounts of space; I do not want to delete the log files, I would only want to delete the contents of the log files.

The command I ran was:

 cat /dev/null > ./*

That gave me an error ... So then I tried:

cat /dev/null > ./*.sh

Same error:

bash: ./*.sh: ambiguous redirect


Anyone know why?
Thanks.

[devils casper]

its ambiguous redirect coz you are not redirecting to single file.





casper

[drewrockshard]

its ambiguous redirect coz you are not redirecting to single file.

How could i remove the contents of all the files then? Not the files themselves .. but the contents. .. Any ideas?

[drewrockshard]

Alright - Figured it out.

I have a little BASH script (if you could call it that). It's actually just one line of code - but it works. To clear out a directory of log files, WITHOUT deleting the actual log file - meaning just clear the contents of each log file run this line of code (presuming you are in the directory that the log files are in (./* - could actually be "/var/log/"):

for i in ./*; do >$i

If the logs were in /var/log - run:

for i in /var/log/*; do >$i

Thanks

[devils casper]

ahaa ! i am glad you sorted out yourself...... i was going to post same 'loop' solution...





casper

[elitemx]

This would be quite faster to execute. It does break when you have too many files.

: | tee *