What is the simplest way to delete the contents of a file in BASH?

Question

I need to delete all lines in a file, but leave essentially an empty file with no content and no lines. As best I know, one can do this:

rm file.txt 2> /dev/null
touch file.txt

However, is there a simpler, more canonical solution in BASH?

Answer 1

This is a pretty fast way I always use:

> file.txt

It completely empties the file and updates the modification time.