How to create an empty file from command line
Use the touch
command:
The touch utility sets the modification and access times of files to the
current time of day. If the file doesn't exist, it is created with
default permissions.
Example:
touch newfile
> newfile
Will also create an empty file. If the file does already exist, it will be truncated (emptied). To keep the file contents, use >>
for appending as in:
>> file
Even if the file exists, the contents will be untouched.
Edit: If you don't have any content to type, this one is faster:
user@host$ :> newfile
user@host$ :>> new_or_existing_file
Note. :
is the command here. It is not part of the prompt.
cat /dev/null > file1.ext
the exact way there is also another way
echo "" > file2.ext
The difference is file1.ext will be zero bytes and file2.ext would be one byte. You can check this by
ls -l file*.*