Redirecting standard output

\> redirect the standard output (aka STDOUT) of the current command into a file or another descriptor.

These examples write the output of the ls command into the file file.txt

ls >file.txt
> file.txt ls

The target file is created if it doesn’t exists, otherwise this file is truncated.

The default redirection descriptor is the standard output or 1 when none is specified. This command is equivalent to the previous examples with the standard output explicitly indicated:

ls 1>file.txt

Note: the redirection is initialized by the executed shell and not by the executed command, therefore it is done before the command execution.