Chris's Wiki :: blog/unix/DdTwoFacets

Is it superstition that I do 'dd if=... bs=<whatever> | cat >/dev/null' instead of just having 'of=/dev/null' because I'm cautious about some version of dd optimizing that command a little too much? Probably.

There are various things you could say about this, but thinking about it has made me realize that in practice, there are two facets to dd, what you could call two usage cases, and they're somewhat in conflict with each other.

The first facet is dd as a way to copy data around. If you view dd this way, it's fine if some combination of dd, your C library, and the kernel optimize how this data copying is done. For example, if dd is reading or writing a file to or from a network socket, in many cases it would be desirable to directly connect the file and the network socket inside the kernel so that you don't have to flow data through user level. If you're using dd to copy data, you generally don't care exactly how it happens, you just want the result.

(Dd traditionally has some odd behavior around block sizes, but many people using dd to copy data don't actually want this behavior or care about it.)

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