gentoo.LinuxHowtos.orgThis tip is for people who have ever hosed important files by using > when they meant to use >>. Add the following line to .bashrc: set -o noclobber. The noclobber option prevents you from overwriting existing files with the > operator.

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% program > file2

bash: file2: cannot overwrite existing file

In some cases you may really want to overwrite the file. In this case, instead of turning noclobber off, you can use >| to force the file to be written.

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% program >| file2 

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