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

[Pádraig Brady]

Russell Coker wrote:
> 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.

Exactly. I expect it to work as per Jim's example above.
I.E. truncate rather than replace.

Pádraig.