TRUNCATE (2)

SYNOPSIS

#include <unistd.h> int truncate(const char * path , off_t length ); int ftruncate(int fd , off_t length );

DESCRIPTION

Truncate causes the file named by path or referenced by fd to be truncated to at most length bytes in size. If the file previously was larger than this size, the extra data is lost. With ftruncate , the file must be open for writing.

RETURN VALUE

On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.

ERRORS

For truncate :

ENOTDIR

A component of the path prefix is not a directory.

EINVAL

The pathname contains a character with the high-order bit set.

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.

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.

EIO

An I/O error occurred updating the inode.

EFAULT

Path points outside the process's allocated address space.

For ftruncate :

EBADF

The fd is not a valid descriptor.

EINVAL

The fd references a socket, not a file.

EINVAL

The fd is not open for writing.

CONFORMING TO

4.4BSD, SVr4 (these function calls first appeared in BSD 4.2). SVr4 documents additional truncate error conditions EINTR, EMFILE, EMULTIHP, ENAMETOOLONG, ENFILE, ENOLINK, ENOTDIR. SVr4 documents for ftruncate additional EAGAIN and EINTR error conditions. POSIX has ftruncate but not truncate .

BUGS

These calls should be generalized to allow ranges of bytes in a file to be discarded.

SEE ALSO

- open (2) -