On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 10:11 AM, Han Boetes <[email protected]> wrote: > From: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/dd.html [...] > So nobody follows the POSIX specification to the letter. Where to > go from here?
OpenBSD is, first of all, a BSD-compatible operating system and, where possible, compliant with other standards too. The POSIX standard says nothing about multipliers larger than "k", however we have a BSD heritage were "m" exists and it is lowercase. We can think on this multiplier as an extension to the POSIX standard. I agree with Theo -- supporting an uppercase multiplier "M" as a synonim for "m" will break compatibility not only with other operating systems, but also with all releases of OpenBSD that exist right now. Modifying dd(1) in this way will make people start writing scripts that are not portable. I would suggest fixing the example instead. On a different matter, I will look more carefully at the diff proposed by Ingo for dd(1) but on a first read it is OK to me.
