On 05/09/2026 13:53, Daniel Hofstetter wrote:
Hi,
I noticed that if I provide a folder as reference, a "file too large"
error is shown. If the specified file exists, no truncation happens.
Otherwise, an empty file is created. It's admittedly an edge case, so
I'm not sure what the expected behavior is.
Here are the steps to reproduce:
$ mkdir folder
$ truncate --reference=folder/ foobar
truncate: failed to truncate 'foobar' at 9223372036854775807 bytes:
File too large
$ echo $?
1
$ ls -l foobar
-rw-r--r-- 1 dho dho 0 Sep 5 14:05 foobar
I'm using coreutils 9.11.
Context: I noticed it while working on uutils coreutils.
Regards,
Daniel
since the meaning of st_size is not defined for directories
we use the fallback of lseek(..., SEEK_END).
On your (file) system it's returning OFF_T_MAX.
What file system are you using?
On tmpfs lseek() returns EINVAL,
on BTRFS it returns the same as st_size from stat.
Perhaps we could prefer st_size for directories,
but it is an edge case as there is no real meaning
to the st_size of a directory.
cheers,
Padraig
