/var/log/syslog owned by syslog:adm and permission denied with truncating it

Question

$ sudo > syslog 
-bash: syslog: Permission denied

$ ls -la syslog 
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 11673034092 2016-09-01 16:55 syslog

What's going on here?

Answer 1

While writing this question I discovered the answer.

For this you need to login as root:

sudo -i

Then run your command, it my case:

> syslog

Always make sure to exit your root shell once you're done with it

exit