16 Sep
2024
16 Sep
'24
9:55 a.m.
You know, this is a place that might actually be able to provide a
definitive answer to me. A brief web search found me asking the same
question in 1995.
When I were a wee lad, I was told `dd` was short for `do DEBE`, which,
while obviously referencing a well-known movie about a Northern Texas
sports team and their most enthusiastic fan, also referred to the mainframe
software whose name was an acronym for `Does Everything But Eat` and whose
function was to copy data across sources with very different blocking and
representation conventions...which is kinda what `dd` does.
Can anyone here confirm or deny that origin for the utility's name?
Adam
On Sun, Sep 15, 2024 at 3:36 PM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 16, 2024 at 08:15:34AM +1000, Rob Pike
wrote:
For me the fascinating thing about dd is that
people tended to use the
JCL
notation for its arguments even after the Unix
style was made available.
That is, people prefer "dd if=foo" rather than "dd -if foo" or even
the
obviously easiest "dd <foo".
Muscle memory. dd is weird but you sort of get used to it and then just
do it how you always have.