Bash:
Writing a text file

How to:

Bash provides straightforward methods for writing to a file. The most common are using redirection operators (>, >>) and the tee command. Here’s a quick look at both techniques.

Using redirection, you can write output directly to a file. The > operator writes content to a file, replacing it if it already exists, while >> appends to an existing file without deleting its content.

# Writing to a file with >
echo "Hello, World!" > myfile.txt

# Appending to a file with >>
echo "This is a new line." >> myfile.txt

If you check the content of myfile.txt after running the above commands, you’d find:

Hello, World!
This is a new line.

The tee command is handy when you want to write to a file and see the output on the screen (stdout) simultaneously. By default, tee overwrites the file, but with the -a flag, it appends to the file.

# Writing and displaying using tee
echo "Hello, again!" | tee myfile.txt

# Appending and displaying using tee -a
echo "Adding another line." | tee -a myfile.txt

After running these, myfile.txt will display:

Hello, again!
Adding another line.

While Bash itself provides robust file manipulation capabilities through redirection and commands like tee, further manipulation or more complex scenarios might require calling external tools or scripting languages (e.g., Awk, Sed, Python) that offer more sophisticated text processing functions. However, for most straightforward file writing tasks, the above methods are fully sufficient and widely used.