May 4, 2015
freebsd-manpages
Manual pages for a GNU/kFreeBSD system
NAME
truncate, ftruncate - truncate or extend a file to a specified length
LIBRARY
.Lb libc
SYNOPSIS
.In unistd.h int
truncate const char *path off_t length
int ftruncate int fd off_t length
DESCRIPTION
The
truncate
system call causes the file named by path or referenced by fd to be truncated or extended to length bytes in size. If the file was larger than this size, the extra data is lost. If the file was smaller than this size, it will be extended as if by writing bytes with the value zero.
The
ftruncate
system call causes the file or shared memory object backing the file descriptor fd to be truncated or extended to length bytes in size. The file descriptor must be a valid file descriptor open for writing. The file position pointer associated with the file descriptor fd will not be modified.RETURN VALUES
.Rv -std If the file to be modified is not a directory or a regular file, the
truncate
call has no effect and returns the value 0.ERRORS
The
truncate
system call succeeds unless:
[ENOTDIR ] |
|
A component of the path prefix is not a directory. | |
[ENAMETOOLONG ] |
|
A component of a pathname exceeded 255 characters, or an entire path name exceeded 1023 characters. | |
[ENOENT ] |
|
The named file does not exist. | |
[EACCES ] |
|
Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix. | |
[EACCES ] |
|
The named file is not writable by the user. | |
[ELOOP ] |
|
Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname. | |
[EPERM ] |
|
The named file has its immutable or append-only flag set, see the chflags(2) manual page for more information. | |
[EISDIR ] |
|
The named file is a directory. | |
[EROFS ] |
|
The named file resides on a read-only file system. | |
[ETXTBSY ] |
|
The file is a pure procedure (shared text) file that is being executed. | |
[EFBIG ] |
|
The length argument was greater than the maximum file size. | |
[EINVAL ] |
|
The length argument was less than 0. | |
[EIO ] |
An I/O error occurred updating the inode. |
[EFAULT ] |
|
The path argument points outside the process’s allocated address space. |
The
ftruncate
system call succeeds unless:[EBADF ] |
|
The fd argument is not a valid descriptor. | |
[EINVAL ] |
|
The fd argument references a file descriptor that is not a regular file or shared memory object. | |
[EINVAL ] |
|
The fd descriptor is not open for writing. |
SEE ALSO
HISTORY
The
truncate
and ftruncate
system calls appeared in BSD 4.2 .BUGS
These calls should be generalized to allow ranges of bytes in a file to be discarded.
Use of
truncate
to extend a file is not portable.