Re: Is there a "make hole" (truncate in middle) syscall?

Daniel Phillips
2003-12-12T21:37:45Z

Hi Andreas,

On Thursday 11 December 2003 14:43, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> Presumably, if a filesystem didn't support a punch filesystem method
> (either because it is unimplemented or because the filesystem doesn't
> support holes) it would be implemented as either a truncate (if end is
> beyond i_size) or a series of zero writes instead.

It would be more regular and less surprising to make it semantically
equivalent to writing a string of zeros, that is, it will never truncate and
may extend a file.

Regards,

Daniel