truncate Command Examples

Shrink or extend the size of a file to the specified size. More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/truncate-invocation.html.

• Set a size of 10 GB to an existing file, or create a new file with the specified size:

truncate {{[-s|--size]}} 10G {{path/to/file}}

• Extend the file size by 50 MiB, fill with holes (which reads as zero bytes):

truncate {{[-s|--size]}} +50M {{path/to/file}}

• Shrink the file by 2 GiB, by removing data from the end of file:

truncate {{[-s|--size]}} -2G {{path/to/file}}

• Empty the file's content:

truncate {{[-s|--size]}} 0 {{path/to/file}}

• Empty the file's content, but do not create the file if it does not exist:

truncate {{[-c|--no-create]}} {{[-s|--size]}} 0 {{path/to/file}}