Most efficient method to empty the contents of a file

Actually, the second form touch filename doesn't delete anything from the file - it only creates an empty file if one did not exist, or updates the last-modified date of an existing file.

And the third filename < /dev/null tries to run filename with /dev/null as input.

cp /dev/null filename works.

As for efficient, the most efficient would be truncate -s 0 filename (see here).

Otherwise, cp /dev/null filename or > filename are both fine. They both open and then close the file, using the truncate-on-open setting. cp also opens /dev/null, so that makes it marginally slower.

On the other hand, truncate would likely be slower than > filename when run from a script since running the truncate command requires the system to open the executable, load it, and then run it.

Other option could be:

echo -n > filename

From the man page of echo:

-n Do not print the trailing newline character.

There is a builtin command ":", which is available in sh,csh,bash and others maybe, which can be easily used with the redirecting output operator > truncate a file:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
:> filename

What I like on this is, that it does not need any external commands like "echo" etc.

One big advantage of truncating files instead of deleate/recreate them is, that running applications which works with this file (e.g. someone makes an tail -f filename or a monitoring software, ...) don't have to reopen it. They just can continue using the filedescriptor and gets all the new data.