"Theodoros V. Kalamatianos" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > lseek is valid on e.g. /dev/hda and people > would not expect dd to null their data till it reached the desired > offset.
True. I guess the algorithm should be to use lseek if possible, and to write nulls otherwise. Then ftruncate if possible. > Perhaps dd should output null bytes only on FIFOs ? I'd say it should output nulls if lseek fails for any reason. > On a relative matter, what should dd do in the following case: > > $ echo -n AB > f > $ echo -n ab | dd bs=1 seek=1 >> f > > What should the contents of `f' be ? Just "ABab". That's a tricky one, since the ">>f" means that stdout is in append mode, which means all writes are appended to the end of the file regardless of the current seek position. So the "seek=1" is ineffective. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
