UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a crontab job that runs a database backup and directs the output to a log. I ran the job, and the output log file was created with no problems, but now if I try and run the same job again, I keep getting a file exists error. The permissions are:

-rw-rw-r--

I also tried changing the permissions to:

-rw-rw-rw-

but still got the same error. If I rename the old log file, a new logfile is created, and everything works fine, and if I make the output append to the log file, rather than overwrite, this also works fine, so it is just when it tries to overwrite.

Run the following command to see what shell options have been set. set -o You will see output similar to this. The noclobber option prevents existing files from being overwritten by redirection operations. If this is set, then turn it off by issueing the following command set +o noclobber


braceexpand on
emacs on
errexit off
hashall on
histexpand on
history on
ignoreeof off
interactive-comments on
keyword off
monitor on
noclobber off

great, thanks for this. it works now.