truncating a file from the top down

[Mike Rovner]

rbt wrote:
> if os.stat says the file is too big:
>     read the file
>     trim = only keep the last 2008 bytes (This is where I get stuck)
>     write trim back out to the original file
> 
> Would someone demonstrate the *best* most efficient way of doing this?

if os.stat says the_file is too big:
   fh = open(the_file, 'rb')
   fh.seek(2008, 2)
   data = fh.read()
   fh.close()
   assert len(data)==2008 # you may want some error processing here
   fh = open(the_file, 'wb')
   fh.write(data)
   fh.close()

/m