Is it possible to truncate a file (in place, same inode) at the beginning?

It is possible to remove trailing bytes of a file without writting to a new file ( > newfile ) and moving it back (mv newfile file). That is done with truncate: truncate -s -1 file It is possible to remove leading bytes but by moving it around (which changes the inode) (for some versions of tail): tail -c +1 file > newfile ; mv newfile file So: How to do that without moving files around? Ideally, like truncate, only a few bytes would need to be changed even for very big files. note: sed -i will change the file inode, so, even if it may be useful, is not an answer to this question IMO.