dd is for handling blocked data, while cat, redirection and pipelines are completely useless for that, since they are not meant to manipulate blocks of data, bu

dd is for handling blocked data, while cat, redirection and pipelines are completely useless for that, since they are not meant to manipulate blocks of data, but streams. They do not compare (apart from really simple cases where either will do, like copying a file into some other file); this blog posts mainly highlights that neither the author nor many tutorial writers now the difference.