Question

I can currently remove the last line of a text file using:

    var lines = System.IO.File.ReadAllLines("test.txt");
    System.IO.File.WriteAllLines("test.txt", lines.Take(lines.Length - 1).ToArray());

Although, how is it possible to instead remove the beginning of the text file?

Answer 1

Instead of lines.Take, you can use lines.Skip, like:

var lines = File.ReadAllLines("test.txt");
File.WriteAllLines("test.txt", lines.Skip(1).ToArray());

to truncate at the beginning despite the fact that the technique used (read all text and write everything back) is very inefficient.

About the efficient way: The inefficiency comes from the necessity to read the whole file into memory. The other way around could easily be to seek in a stream and copy the stream to another output file, delete the original, and rename the old. That one would be equally fast and yet consume much less memory.

Truncating a file at the end is much easier. You can just find the trunaction position and call FileStream.SetLength().