My favorite thing to do with 'dd' is to break up multi-gigabyte log files into, say, 500MB chunks, so I can easily view and search them in XEmacs (this is 'csh'

My favorite thing to do with 'dd' is to break up multi-gigabyte log files into, say, 500MB chunks, so I can easily view and search them in XEmacs (this is 'csh' syntax as I use 'tcsh'): foreach i (0 1 2 3 [...]) dd <big.log >big.log.$i bs=500m count=1 skip=$i end (XEmacs is very fast at reading large files but has a 1GB limit.)