On Mon, Dec 10, 2018 at 01:56:49PM -0800, Josh Steadmon wrote: > > "stat(1)" is not so portable, so you'll get complaints from minority > > platform users later. So is "truncate(1)". > > Ack, thanks for the catch. I have a workaround for stat in the form of > "wc -c", and for truncate with a combination of dd and /dev/zero. > However, I'm finding conflicting information about whether or not > /dev/zero exists on macOS. At the least, it sounds like it might not > work on very old versions. Would this be acceptable, or should I add a > new test function to do this?
If you're just interested in truncation (and not a bunch of zero bytes), you can dd from /dev/null. Another way to truncate is to move the file elsewhere, and then copy only some of the bytes back (see t1450's "fsck detects truncated loose object"). -Peff
