In my experience dd is great for binary data. Yes, pretty much everything on Unix operates on files, as does dd. But so many utilities are either line based or

In my experience dd is great for binary data. Yes, pretty much everything on Unix operates on files, as does dd. But so many utilities are either line based or don't handle null bytes, and it's a pain to have determine how a given program handles binary data when I know dd will at least not mess with it.