Interesting guess but wrong I'm afraid :) It's simply because it's an easy way to create a file of a certain size that most Linux users would be familiar with.

Interesting guess but wrong I'm afraid :) It's simply because it's an easy way to create a file of a certain size that most Linux users would be familiar with. The quicker way (and possibly more "proper" way) is to use fallocate, but who has even heard of that vs dd ?