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bug#14686: Bug#713022: truncate man and info pages must mention -s / -r
From: |
Pádraig Brady |
Subject: |
bug#14686: Bug#713022: truncate man and info pages must mention -s / -r mandatory |
Date: |
Sat, 22 Jun 2013 10:58:21 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130110 Thunderbird/17.0.2 |
On 06/22/2013 09:42 AM, address@hidden wrote:
> I thought it would do the obvious, like touch does.
>
>
> NAME
> touch - change file timestamps
>
> SYNOPSIS
> touch [OPTION]... FILE...
>
> DESCRIPTION
> Update the access and modification times of each FILE to the current
> time.
>
> A FILE argument that does not exist is created empty, unless -c or -h
> is supplied.
>
>
>
> NAME
> 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.
>
>
>
> Who would have guessed that for some reason an argument is required,
> I don't see why
> $ truncate FILE
> cannot just work too.
> You know, to truncate the file, to zero bytes.
> But hey I'm not a pro.
I remember discussing the interface at the time.
The thinking was that since data was destroyed here,
an explicit -s0 was required to avoid typos like:
truncate - s1M file
Behaving like you suggest would create '-' and 's1M'
and truncate 'file' without warning.
cheers,
Pádraig.