Overwrite To A File

Now that you understand standard output, let's redirect it somewhere useful. The > operator takes the output of a command and writes it to a file instead of displaying it on screen.

echo "Hello" > greeting.txt

This creates a file called greeting.txt containing the word Hello. Nothing appears on screen because the output went into the file instead.

You can redirect the output of any command:

ls > filelist.txt
cat names.txt > backup.txt
date > timestamp.txt

Warning: The > operator overwrites the file completely. If the file already exists, its previous contents are erased and replaced with the new output.

echo "First line" > notes.txt
echo "Second line" > notes.txt
cat notes.txt

Output:

Second line

The first line is gone because the second command overwrote the entire file. This behavior is powerful but requires caution — you can accidentally lose data if you redirect to an existing file.