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 back end is a common operation–something we do without even thinking much about it. But lopping off the front of a file? Sounds ridiculous at first, but only because we’ve been trained to think that it’s impossible. But a lop operation could be useful in some situations.

A simple example (certainly not the only or necessarily the best example) is a FIFO queue. You’re adding new items to the end of the file and pulling items out of the file from the front. The file grows over time and there’s a huge empty space at the front. With current file systems, there are several ways around this problem:

• As each item is removed, copy the remaining items up to replace it, and truncate the file. Although it works, this solution is very expensive time-wise.
• Monitor the size of the empty space at the front, and when it reaches a particular size or percentage of the entire file size, move everything up and truncate the file. This is much more efficient than the previous solution, but still costs time when items are moved in the file.
• Implement a circular queue in the file, adding new items to the hole at the front of the file as items are removed. This can be quite efficient, especially if you don’t mind the possibility of things getting out of order in the queue. If you do care about order, there’s the potential of having to move items around. But in general, a circular queue is pretty easy to implement and manages disk space well.

But if there was a lop operation, removing an item from the queue would be as easy as updating the beginning-of-file marker. As easy, in fact, as truncating a file. Why, then, is there no such operation?

I understand a bit about file systems implementation, and don't see any particular reason this would be difficult. It looks to me like all it would require is another word (dword, perhaps?) per allocation entry to say where the file starts within the block. With 1 terabyte drives under $100 US, it seems like a pretty small price to pay for such functionality.

What other tasks would be made easier if you could lop off the front of a file as efficiently as you can truncate at the end?

Can you think of any technical reason this function couldn't be added to a modern file system? Other, non-technical reasons?

Answer 1

On file systems that support sparse files "punching" a hole and removing data at an arbitrary file position is very easy. The operating system just has to mark the corresponding blocks as "not allocated". Removing data from the beginning of a file is just a special case of this operation. The main thing that is required is a system call that will implement such an operation: ftruncate2(int fd, off_t offset, size_t count).

On Linux systems this is actually implemented with the fallocate system call by specifying the FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE flag to zero-out a range and the FALLOC_FL_COLLAPSE_RANGE flag to completely remove the data in that range. Note that there are restrictions on what ranges can be specified and that not all filesystems support these operations.