Talk:dd (Unix)

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Dcfldd was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 17 April 2013 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Dd (Unix). The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here.

Learn The DD Command External Reference

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improve text / examples

I just /dev/zero'ed some harddisks and i found out, that the blocksize has a great performance impact

With defautl bs: 15MB/s

With bs=100M: 65MB/s

Maybe also mention that sending SIGUSR1 to gnu dd will make it print progress and writing speed.

Example code:

while sleep 1s; do killall dd -USR1 2> /dev/null; done &

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=100M

name of the command dd

There is a talk on blacklisted pupular video site by Hedrik Jan Thomassen about UNIX history. He mention (30:37) about why dd is called dd (this could be a joke from his side). Full title of the video is: T-Dose 2016, From UNIX to Linux, a time lapse of 45 years, Hendrik Jan Thomassen

You mean that it is called as DD, instead CC (Convert and Copy a file), because the CC was already taken for "C Compiler" and so on it was named as DD by shifting both alphabets by one and it became DD? --Golftheman (talk) 21:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Misleading title

As dd runs on more than Unix, the title "dd (Unix)" is misleading. But, what to use? Seems to be various precedents to follow:

Of those three options I'd pick command. It's broader than Unix, but not as broad as software.

Also, the body mentions Windows so the list of platforms (Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and Unix-like) is less than accurate. Stevebroshar (talk) 15:53, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]