Is it possible to delete part of a file (let’s say from the beginning to its half), without having to use another file?
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Is it possible to delete part of a file (let’s say from the beginning to its half), without having to use another file?
Thank’s!
The short answer is that no, most file systems don’t attempt to support operations like that.
That leaves you with two choices. The obvious one is to create a copy of the data, leaving out the parts you don’t want. You can do this either in-place (i.e., moving the data around in the same file) or by using an auxiliary file, typically copying the data to the new file, then doing something like renaming the new file to the old name.
The other major choice is to simply re-structure your file and data so you don’t have to get rid of the old data at all. For example, if you want to keep the most recent N amount of data from a process, you might structure (most of) the file as a circular buffer, with a couple of “pointers” at the beginning tell you the head and tail points, so you know where to read data from/write data to. With a structure like this, you don’t erase or remove the old data, you just overwrite it as needed.