16 Sep
2024
16 Sep
'24
11:06 a.m.
On Mon, 16 Sept 2024 at 00:11, Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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?
I looked through a broad swath of dd source files and man pages from v5 to
System III and SVR4, the BSD SCCS tree, various commercial UNIXes, modern
BSDs, and modern Linux but none of them have any sort of explanation of the
name. I figured I'd at least find something!
It is the case that many places refer to the command's function as "convert
and copy," so I wonder if it's some sort of play on the fact that the
expected name of the command might be "cc".
-Henry