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Someone should write a wiki bot to crawl through the wikis for Arch, Debian, and so forth to help rewrite all these bad instructions.
I certainly agree the syntax of the arguments is strange, due to its age, but I don't agree that learning it is difficult or a waste of time.
All I've learned is that the author doesn't like dd well enough to learn it.
What about the `seek` argument which skips over some blocks at the beginning but still allocates them (unix "holes")? Also note that there are still unix systems out there which do not support byte-level granularity of access to block devices. On those devices you must actually use a buffer of exactly the size of the blocks on the device. Heck, linux was like this until at least v2.
Someone should write a wiki bot to crawl through the wikis for Arch, Debian, and so forth to help rewrite all these bad instructions.
I mean, are they bad instructions? They work for most people, and they're what most people are familliar with. If I ask a random *ix user what's wrong with my shell command, they're more likely to know about dd.
You wanna format a usb key? Google this, copy/paste these dd instructions, it works, move on with your life.
You wanna format a usb key using something related to cat you once saw and didn't fully understand? Have fun.
Both approaches have their weak points, but in any OS the answer to "How do I format a usb key" should not start with "Oh boy, let's have a Socratic dialog over 10 years on how to do that."
You wanna format a usb key? Google this, copy/paste these dd instructions, it works, move on with your life.
You wanna format a usb key using something related to cat you once saw and didn't fully understand? Have fun.
Both approaches have their weak points, but in any OS the answer to "How do I format a usb key" should not start with "Oh boy, let's have a Socratic dialog over 10 years on how to do that."
One thing I'll often use dd for is recovering data from a failing drive. Can head ignore read errors? dd can. As far as I'm concerned, dd is lower-level than most of the other utilities and provides more control over what's happening. The author does have a point that the syntax is strange though.
dd's "highly nonstandard syntax" comes from the JCL programming language, but it's really just another tool to read and write files. At the end of the day it's not more complex or incompatible than other unix tools. For example, you can also use tools like `pv` with dd no problem to get progress statements.