Truncate:Reduce file size from command line in linux

We can change the size of a file from the command line using the command truncate.

For e.g.

$ ls -lh -rw-r--r-- 1 nitin adm 7.3K Apr 5 2012 temp.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 nitin adm 9.4K Apr 5 2012 temp1.txt

We can change the size of temp1.txt to any size we need.

$ truncate -s 4k temp1.txt $ ls -rw-r--r-- 1 nitin adm 7.3K Apr 5 2012 temp.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 nitin adm 4.0K Apr 5 2012 temp1.txt

But be careful as the truncation simply removes the content of the file to reduce its size.