Re: dd (coreutils) 5.97 used power of 10 not 2 for calculating MB

[Paul Eggert]

Olivier Delhomme <address@hidden> writes:

>  3. used with "quiet" parameter it turns off the output (stated
>     a long time ago here : 
>     http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165045).

OK, but status=noxfer does that already, so I'm still a bit confused.

>  2. used with "human" parameter the classic output is turned
>     into a human readable format

We should distinguish here between longstanding output (which I would
call "classic") and GNU output.  For example, on Solaris 10,
/usr/bin/dd has the "classic" output:

   $ gnudd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=128k count=1000
   1000+0 records in
   1000+0 records out
   131072000 bytes (131 MB) copied, 0.0981356 s, 1.3 GB/s
   $ /usr/bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=128k count=1000
   1000+0 records in
   1000+0 records out

The "classic" output also includes truncated blocks when that happens.
The details are specified in
<http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/dd.html>
under STDERR.

Now, as I understand it, you want a way to change the format of the
standard-required lines to use si or human styles, and to count bytes.
But why bother?  If all we want is to count bytes, all we need is the
3rd line, right?

How about the following counterproposal?  We let "status=+FORMAT"
specify FORMAT as the format of the status line.  Users can then
supply the format they like.  E.g., the current behavior could be
implemented via something like this:

status=+'%I+%i records in
%O+%o records out
%b bytes (%Sb) copied, %T s, %Sr/s'

where 'S' is a modifier that says 'human-readable with SI units'.  The
user can substitute whatever other format they like.  This should be
easier to document and to explain than to have several flags
controlling the format.