On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 09:33:49AM -0700, Warren Block wrote: > per...@pluto.rain.com wrote: > > Greg Larkin <glar...@freebsd.org> wrote: > > > ... > > > > truncate -4 myfile should get rid of the last four bytes. Maybe > > > > there's a similar efficient way to truncate the start of a file. > > > > > > This should do it: > > > > > > dd if=oldfile of=newfile bs=1 skip=4 > > > > Or, perhaps marginally more efficient: > > > > dd if=oldfile of=newfile bs=4 skip=1 > > It would be nice to avoid the file copy, but maybe there's no way to do > that. The small buffer size for dd will probably make copies of > multi-gig files slow. This might be faster: > > tail -c +5 myfile > outfile > truncate -4 outfile > > (Has anyone mentioned that you can edit binary files interactively with > vi yet? No? Well, it's horrific and surely has interesting failure > modes. And there are probably disadvantages also.)
Vim, yes. I tried, but failed. At the moment dd/truncate combination seems the most appealing. But I'll look at C/perl/python proposed solutions as well. many thanks -- Anton Shterenlikht Room 2.6, Queen's Building Mech Eng Dept Bristol University University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK Tel: +44 (0)117 331 5944 Fax: +44 (0)117 929 4423 _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"