TIL about bash's noclobber and a special redirection operator permalink

Today I learned about a special redirection operator in bash: >|.

GNU Bash (and other POSIX-like shell environments) have a bunch of built in options that will modify the behavior of the environment when changed. One of these is the noclobber option that prevents redirecting stdout of a command to overwrite a file if it already exists:

λ › ls CNAME
CNAME
λ › echo "This will fail" > CNAME
zsh: file exists: CNAME

You can see the value of this shell option by using the set -o command:

λ › set -o | rg noclobber
noclobber             on

You can turn it off using set +o and suddenly you’ll be able to overwrite files using a vanilla stdout redirect:

λ › set +o noclobber
λ › set -o | rg noclobber
noclobber             off
λ › echo "This will work" > CNAME
λ › echo $?
0

This is usually enabled by default because safety.

But there’s also a way to explicitly override this setting - enter >|!

λ › ls CNAME
CNAME
λ › echo "This works too" >| CNAME
λ › echo $?
0

I learned this when building a bunch of scripts to help me analyze some source code that someday I hope to share. Specifically, I was getting tired of having to delete a file before re-running the script during development. This allowed me to make my commands more concise.

From this I learned of noclobber and the shell builtin optiens!

DISCLAIMER: I actually learned about this last week but thought it wa sworth sharing. I’m surprised at how long it took me to find this!