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I honestly didn't know that dd just did the same thing as cp or cat. I thought you had to use it for making bootable USBs because it was doing some kind of spec
by _dain_ 4y ago
I honestly didn't know that dd just did the same thing as cp or cat. I thought you had to use it for making bootable USBs because it was doing some kind of special arcane magic behind the scenes .. this intuition was reinforced by the fact that so many GUI tools purporting to make bootable USBs are so unreliable. If literally all you have to do is copy bytes from one place to another, why the fuck do those tools fail so often?
Doing this kind of thing is a) rare and b) usually you have more things on your mind at the time, so you tend to be quite conservative and not think to experiment.
- notacoward 4y ago> special arcane magic It doesn't really do anything particularly arcane (unless you count EBCDIC conversions) but it does things that are useful and often necessary that other equally-standard utilities can't. Isn't that good enough? > Doing this kind of thing is a) rare Probably not as rare as you think. Maybe it's not all that useful for writing applications, but for the quite large number of people who have to do provisioning (either bare-metal or virtual) and such it's a different matter. There's a lot to be said for tools that are ubiquitous, well standardized, and flexible.