Russell Coker wrote: > On Tuesday 26 February 2008 21:03, Pádraig Brady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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.
