Truncate file at front

Question

A problem I was working on recently got me to wishing that I could lop off the front of a file. Kind of like a “truncate at front,” if you will. Truncating a file at the bac

Answer 1

I think there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in there: because filesystems have not supported this kind of behavior efficiently, people haven't written programs to use it, and because people haven't written programs to use it, there's little incentive for filesystems to support it.

You could always write your own filesystem to do this, or maybe modify an existing one (although filesystems used "in the wild" are probably pretty complicated, you might have an easier time starting from scratch). If people find it useful enough it might catch on ;-)