Re: truncate file

From:

Carl Barron <cbarron413@adelphia.net>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++.moderated

Date:

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 23:56:29 CST

Message-ID:

<110920072146549379%cbarron413@adelphia.net>

In article <m6GdnZO_DsqoS3vbnZ2dnUVZ8vmdnZ2d@pipex.net>, Stephen Howe
<sjhoweATdialDOTpipexDOTcom@giganews.com> wrote:

Given that both rename() and remove() are supplied, I see no reason why some
form of truncate() should not be supplied.
I would argue that this a reasonably common operation. In several decades
programming I have wanted to truncate on a number of occasions.
The alternatives are considerably more inefficient and I am reasonably
confident that it is implementable for nearly every OS that supports file
operations.

Stephen Howe

     Rename() and remove() [from <cstdio> not <algorithm>] are in the
standard library because they are inherited from c89. I would state
not everyone is posix or ms windows what have your. It is possible to
truncate on both windows and posix compliant filesystems but not all
the world is posix nor is it microsoft. I don't see truncate in c99
either. BTW. If you need truncation use an available os function if
not just copy and be done with it. If you write a wrapper with some
nice name like truncate_file(...) then its easy to [hopefullly the
interface works with most os functions to truncate files] write these
wrappers with conditional compilation or some build decisions.

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