On 03/19/2011 11:26 AM, John Morris wrote: > On a 64bit platform shouldn't the following command have done the > expected thing instead of quietly clipping to 231?
It depends on what your platform's 64-bit 'read' system call does. My guess is that your platform's 'read' syscall refuses to read more than 2**31 - 2**12 bytes at a time from /dev/zero, so the problem (if any :-) is with 'read', not with 'dd'.
