On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, Alexander Langer wrote:

# Thus spake John Hawkinson (jhawk@MIT.EDU):
# 
# > | FreeBSD recently imported a truncate(1) utility into their
# > | src-tree, which is a command-line frontend to truncate(2).
# > Why is not ``dd'' sufficient?

Because "dd" requires an intermediate copy to truncate the
file while a truncate(1) utility would use truncate(2) to
truncate the file in place -- more quickly, I might add.

# It is, for some cases.
# However, truncate -r /foo/bar /path/baz
# or       truncate -s +1MB /somefile
# 
# become ugly hacks with shell scripts and dd.

Oh, is this silly "let's emulate linux and incorporate perl into the
main tree" argument *still* going on?  Give it a rest.  Perl is NOT
the be-all end-all of the programming/scripting world.  It's okay for
prototyping but anything permanently worthwhile is probably best written
in C.

				--*greywolf;
--
BSD: An Operating System For Everyone