One thing dd does for me, that cp and cat do not, is that it forces me to read and check the command at least three times before pressing enter, which is a ver

One thing dd does for me, that cp and cat do not, is that it forces me to read and check the command at least three times before pressing enter, which is a very good thing when messing with raw devices. When I first learned that dd was not magical, I started using cp but I made some mistakes with partitions number and whatnot (nothing serious). Maybe it's just the wierd syntax or the fact that I treat dd differently, I'm just more cautious and don't press enter automatically. Of course it's silly but to me at least, that's a good reason to keep using dd.