Re: From Anxious StsAdmi: dd does't work with tape drive?????

[Paul Eggert]

> Date: Sun, 22 Dec 2002 11:41:00 -0700
> From: address@hidden (Bob Proulx)
> 
> Reading the documentation it says that bs overrides both ibs and obs.
> I could use an education here.  Could you enlighten me as to how
> setting obs only solves the problem when setting bs, which overrides
> obs, does not?  What is the behavior of dd when ibs is not set that is
> changed by having it set?

It is a bit tricky, but more details can be found in:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/dd.html

The GNU documentation could be better, I suppose.  Also there are
undoubtedly some POSIX conformance problems, e.g. POSIX says that
"bs=1024 ibs=512" is equivalent to plain "bs=1024", but from code
inspection this doesn't seem to be true for GNU dd.

> That should be 'swap' not 'swab'.

No, "swab" is right.  It's short for "swap bytes".