Truncating a file while it's being used (Linux)

Question

I have a process that\'s writing a lot of data to stdout, which I\'m redirecting to a log file. I\'d like to limit the size of the file by occasionally copying the current

Answer 1

I downloaded and compiled the latest coreutils so I could have truncate available.

Ran ./configure and make, but did not run make install.

All the compiled utilities appear in the "src" folder.

I ran

[path]/src/truncate -s 1024000 textfileineedtotruncate.log

on a 1.7 GB log file.

It did not change the size listed when using ls -l, but it did free up all the disk space - which is what I really needed to do before /var filled up and killed the process.

Thanks for the tip on "truncate"!