fallocate

fallocate [-n] [-o offset] -l length filename

fallocate is used to preallocate blocks to a file. For filesystems which support the fallocate system call, this is done quickly by allocating blocks and marking them as uninitialized, requiring no IO to the data blocks. This is much faster than creating a file by filling it with zeros.

As of the Linux Kernel v2.6.31, the fallocate system call is supported by the btrfs, ext4, ocfs2, and xfs filesystems.

The exit code returned by fallocate is 0 on success and 1 on failure.

The length and offset arguments may be followed by binary (2^N) suffixes KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB, PiB and EiB (the "iB" is optional, e.g. "K" has the same meaning as "KiB") or decimal (10^N) suffixes KB, MB, GB, PB and EB.

-h, --help

Print help and exit.

-n, --keep-size

Do not modify the apparent length of the file. This may effectively allocate blocks past EOF, which can be removed with a truncate.

-o, --offset offset

Specifies the beginning offset of the allocation, in bytes.

-l, --length length

Specifies the length of the allocation, in bytes.

Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>
Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>

fallocate(2), posix_fallocate(3), truncate(1)

The fallocate command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.