[ On Monday, July 24, 2000 at 00:19:56 (-0700), Greywolf wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Suggestion: inclusion of the truncate(1) utility into the tree
>
> Greg, I believe that the skip= parameter has been there for quite some
> time... 4.3 is verifiable; the man page which states "4th Berkeley
> Distribution" implies as far back as 4.0 (or 4.1 if there was no 4.0);
> I'm willing to place a bet on SVR0.

I'm absolutely certain that no AT&T Unix up to SysVr3.2 ever supported
truncate(2) in the manner 4.3BSD's does.

I highly doubt the SysVr4.0 lineage of dd does either, since they don't
claim to in the manual pages.

Indeed Research Unix Tenth Edition doesn't even claim to be able to
truncate files.

SunOS-5 dd does do truncates, and claims so since at least 1996, though
I'm guessing they got the idea from POSIX or 4.3BSD.

> ...can anyone else confirm its existence in V7, which would sub-
> stantially predate either of the above?

I can authoritatively show from the sources that V7 (and 32V and
System-III) does not do truncates (and of course it's pretty much
impossible for it to do so in the first place since V7 doesn't have a
truncate(2) system call or anything equivalent!  ;-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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