Re: Bug#467378: coreutils: Please include a program to truncate files

[Russell Coker]

On Tuesday 26 February 2008 21:03, Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> wrote:
> > That depends on your definition of "works".
> > If you don't mind retaining the first 2GiB of content in
> > a preexisting output file, then it works fine.  But the initial
> > truncation is required if you want to be sure it's a big sparse
> > file with nothing but NUL bytes.
> >
> > Try this:
> >
> >     echo foo > k
> >     dd bs=1 seek=2G of=k < /dev/null
> >     head -c4 k
> >
> > and note that it prints "foo\n".
>
> That's how I would expect it to work,
> and is how I'm currently implementing it.
> Given the name "truncate" I think this
> operation should be obvious to users.

What exactly do you mean by "how I expect it to work", do you mean "reducing 
the file size" or "removing all content and extending it to size N"?  The 
latter is not truncation, it's replacement.