[Samuel Thibault] > > I think "cp" is even more straightforward. > > Does cp accept that way since a long time?
I'm not sure, but I've been using things like "cp boot.img /dev/fd0" for probably 10 or 15 years on various Linux and Unix systems. (The fact that I referred to a floppy drive may give some idea of how long....) I am not sure where the idea came from that reading or writing block devices always requires 'dd', but if I were to guess, I'd say we can blame tape drives (which aren't even block devices, but char devices). As I recall, you can choose the block size when you format or write a tape, and maybe there are ancient systems out there in which userspace must be explicit when reading and writing them. (Normally, though, I _think_ you just tell the kernel tape driver the right parameters using, e.g. 'mt', then let it handle writing full blocks.) Peter -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120515230005.ge2...@p12n.org
