In bash, the empty command can be redirected to a file: % >out
It will create or overwrite 'out' as the empty file. That may be useful. But somehow you can also say % whoami | >out This again writes empty content. I suggest this odd feature is not useful and indeed gets in the way, since when making pipelines you may mistakenly put an extra | at the last step before the output redirection. Bash should forbid the odd syntax with | immediately followed by >. If you have | it must be followed by a command. Note that in most cases this is already required: % | # syntax error % whoami | # syntax error -- Ed Avis <e...@waniasset.com> ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the Symantec Email Security.cloud service. For more information please visit http://www.symanteccloud.com ______________________________________________________________________
