truncate (1) Linux Manual Page

truncate – shrink or extend the size of a file to the specified size

Synopsis

truncate ,OPTION/… ,FILE/…

Description

Shrink or extend the size of each FILE to the specified size

A FILE argument that does not exist is created.

If a FILE is larger than the specified size, the extra data is lost. If a FILE is shorter, it is extended and the sparse extended part (hole) reads as zero bytes.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

-c, –no-create

do not create any files

-o, –io-blocks

treat SIZE as number of IO blocks instead of bytes

-r, –reference=,RFILE/

base size on RFILE

-s, –size=,SIZE/

set or adjust the file size by SIZE bytes

–help

display this help and exit

–version

output version information and exit

The SIZE argument is an integer and optional unit (example: 10K is 10*1024). Units are K,M,G,T,P,E,Z,Y (powers of 1024) or KB,MB,… (powers of 1000). Binary prefixes can be used, too: KiB=K, MiB=M, and so on.

SIZE may also be prefixed by one of the following modifying characters: ‘+’ extend by, ‘-‘ reduce by, ‘<‘ at most, ‘>’ at least, ‘/’ round down to multiple of, ‘%’ round up to multiple of.

Author

Written by Padraig Brady.

Reporting Bugs

GNU coreutils online help: <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
Report any translation bugs to <https://translationproject.org/team/>

Copyright

Copyright © 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

See Also

dd(1), truncate(2), ftruncate(2)

Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/truncate>
or available locally via: info ‘(coreutils) truncate invocation’