u...@mailo.com [u...@mailo.com] wrote: > The article: > https://eklitzke.org/the-cult-of-dd > > The content of the article: > > The Cult of DD > Mar 17, 2017 > You'll often see instructions for creating and using disk images on Unix > systems making use of the dd command. This is a strange program of > [obscure provenance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)) that > somehow, still manages to survive in the 21st century. >
The guy's complaints are somewhat valid. dd can be replaced with cat in many cases for the simple use case of dd if=file of=disk. Setting a higher block size (bs= argument) does make dd more efficient for writing whole disk images, and that's by design. It works with very small "blocks" by default. The dd tool comes in handy when you are trying to do something more than just write a whole disk image. I don't think there will be much conversion from EBCDIC to ASCII these days, but you can grab specific locations out of something instead of the whole thing, that's the more sophisticated use of dd. count=, seek=, skip= all depend on the desired block size bs=. conv=noerror, fsync are both occasionally useful and i'm sure someone else has another interesting use case aside from these things. Sure, the use of dd for everything related to disk is straight up cargo-cult, but also a good opportunity to learn the ins and outs of dd :) Chris
