NAME

     truncate, ftruncate — truncate or extend a file to a specified length

LIBRARY

     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS

     #include <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.  With ftruncate(), the file must be open for writing.

RETURN VALUES

     Upon successful completion, the value 0 is returned; otherwise the value -1 is returned and
     the global variable errno is set to indicate the error.  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 socket, not a file.

     [EINVAL]           The fd descriptor is not open for writing.

SEE ALSO

     chflags(2), open(2)

HISTORY

     The truncate() system call appeared in 4.2BSD.

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.