> There's an obscure option to GNU dd to get it to display a progress meter as well. But why bother memorizing that?
Why bother memorizing when you can man dd?
Proud member of the cult! I've used dd for all kinds of things:
- Extract the magic bits from a file
- Copy the disk MBR
- Make a disk image with a specific block size and confirm it wrote correctly
- Create loopback disk images
- Over-format floppy disks for Linux distros that need every extra byte
- "Securely" delete files (overwrite exact file size with random junk)
- Copy data more efficiently by changing block size
Some of dd's useful functions:
- format fixed-length records from newline-separated input
- transform lowercase to uppercase and vice-versa
- create sparse files
- don't truncate data
- don't stop processing on errors
- skip and seek in files, input and output, separately
I agree. My use of dd just scratches the surface of its capabilities, but this article hasn't convinced me in the slightest to use anything else.
I've seen a lot of hate for dd lately and I don't really understand why, except that maybe people are getting hung up on the nonstandard arg format and unaware of the tool's versatility. I'm not convinced that cat or tail are better (or even as good) for the examples listed in TFA, and if I couldn't remember something as easy as "status=progress" there's no way I'm going to memorize those cat and head pipe contraptions.
Why bother memorizing when you can man dd?
Proud member of the cult! I've used dd for all kinds of things:
Some of dd's useful functions: