TRUNCATE(1)

💅 TRUNCATE(1) — the manual page, but make it cute

okay bestie, welcome to TRUNCATE(1), a General Commands Manual entry, and honestly? she's that girl. this is your one-stop shop for making files bigger or smaller whenever you want. no drama, just math. 🌸

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✨ NAME ✨

truncate — Shrink or extend the size of each file to the specified size.

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🌈 SYNOPSIS 🌈

truncate [OPTION]... [FILE]...

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

Shrink or extend the size of each file to the specified size. that's it. that's the whole vibe. you point her at some files, you hand her a size, and she makes it happen — cutting them down or growing them out, no questions asked. 👑

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -o, --io-blocks — treat SIZE as the number of I/O blocks of the file rather than bytes (so like, block math instead of byte math, iykyk)
• -c, --no-create — do not create files that do not exist (she'll just skip 'em, respectfully 🙈)
• -r, --reference <RFILE> — base the size of each file on the size of RFILE (copy her measurements, basically ✨)
• -s, --size <SIZE> — set or adjust the size of each file according to SIZE, which is in bytes unless --io-blocks is specified
• -h, --help — Print help
• -V, --version — Print version
• <FILE> — the file(s). your main characters. 🌟

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🔥 EXTRA 🔥

so SIZE? she's an integer with an optional prefix and an optional unit. iconic range, honestly.

the available units are K, M, G, T, P, E, Z, and Y, and they go like this:

'KB' => 1000 (kilobytes)
'K' => 1024 (kibibytes)
'MB' => 1000*1000 (megabytes)
'M' => 1024*1024 (mebibytes)
'GB' => 1000*1000*1000 (gigabytes)
'G' => 1024*1024*1024 (gibibytes)

note: lowercase-pretty K is the 1024 one, and KB is the 1000 one. do not mix them up bestie, we've all been there. 💀

SIZE may also be prefixed by one of the following, which adjusts the size of each file based on its current size:

'+' => extend by
'-' => reduce by
'<' => at most
'>' => at least
'/' => round down to multiple of
'%' => round up to multiple of

like, she's not just setting a number, she's negotiating with the number that's already there. queen behavior. 💅

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⭐ VERSION ⭐

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

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🦋 EXAMPLES 🦋

Set a size of 10 GB to an existing file, or create a new file with the specified size:

truncate [-s|--size] 10G path/to/file

Extend the file size by 50 MiB, fill with holes (which reads as zero bytes):

truncate [-s|--size] +50M path/to/file

Shrink the file by 2 GiB, by removing data from the end of file:

truncate [-s|--size] -2G path/to/file

Empty the file's content:

truncate [-s|--size] 0 path/to/file

Empty the file's content, but do not create the file if it does not exist:

truncate [-s|--size] 0 [-c|--no-create] path/to/file

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail.

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okay that's the whole page, you're officially a truncate girlie now 🫶 go forth and resize. this was the TRUNCATE(1) manual, dated 2026-09-25, brought to you by v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0 — mwah, love u, bye bestie!! 💜🎀✨