[TUHS] PDP-7 UNIX filesystem

Mary Ann Horton mah at mhorton.net
Wed Oct 23 10:07:33 AEST 2019


dd is deprecated?  I'm surprised. I use it all the time. It's great when 
a blocksize of 512 is too slow, like for large files onto slow backup 
disks or network transfers, I might use dd bs=10240 or some such thing.

I suppose the block size on Linux might be bigger these days, but the 
command is still standard.

     Mary Ann

On 10/22/19 11:07 AM, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> Since you mentioned the word dd, the utility which serves me like none
>> other for my frequent rewrites of images, it too has an interesting past,
>> it seems like 'dd' was non-unixy in it's design approach, if I'm to believe
>> the lores around, which leads me to think that this might have been another
>> one of the many idiosyncratic naming conventions used back then. More on
>> the dd stuff: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/dd.html
> As noted in the jargon file, the dd(1) syntax is deliberately reminiscent
> of the DD statement in IBM JCL.  This was presumably a joke and one of the
> BTL old-timers on the list may know more of the background.
>


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