emptying a file and keeping its ownership

[Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR]

As quoted from <1990Dec31.214030.7816 at athena.mit.edu> by jik at athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens):
+---------------
|   Several people have suggested using
|     > $FILE
| to truncate a file while retaining its old permissions.  This will work under
| sh or ksh or bash or other shells that allow null commands for redirection. 
| Unfortunately, csh and tcsh do not allow such null commands :-(.  Therefore,
+---------------

	% ls -s file
	4 file
	% echo > file
	% ls -s file
	0 file
	% _

Not that I like csh's echo behavior in this case, but it does get around the
"null command" problem.

++Brandon
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