Question

I´d like to empty all files from a directory. I´d tried this:

find myFolderPath/* -exec cat /dev/null > {} ';'

but it does not work. How can I do it?

Answer 1

You can’t use redirection (>) within find -exec directly because it happens before the command runs and creates a file called {}. To get around this you need to do it in a new shell by using sh -c.

Also, note that you don’t need to cat /dev/null > file in order to clobber a file. You can simply use > file.

Try this:

find . -type f -exec sh -c '>"{}"' \;