Question

The >> symbol is used to overwrite the existing file if it exists.

(a) True

(b) False

The question was asked during an interview for a job.

Question is taken from Redirection and Pipes topic in chapter The Shell of Unix

Answer 1

Correct choice is (b) False

Easy explanation: The shell provides the >> symbol (right chevron used twice) to append to an existing file. For example,

//Do a word count program on sample.txt and append the output to newfile as shown below.

$ wc  sample.txt >> newfile