Re: [Bug-ddrescue] GNU ddrescue 1.18-pre1 released

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Paul L Daniels wrote:
> Many thanks for bringing this out :)   I've got quite a few drives here
> that I'll be testing it out on, including some with 'marginal
> prefailure' symptoms, so it will be a good test.

You are welcome. :-) I'm looking forward to knowing the results of your 
tests.


> One thing I was going to add in to the code (or you can do it :) ) is
> to have a read-only option, since normally I do things like this;
>
>         ddrescue -v -f /dev/sda /dev/null client-drive.log
>
> With the read-only option it wouldn't bother writing data to /dev/null.

This is easily doable. It is just like the "--test" option of lzip and 
similar compressors, which "performs a trial decompression and throws 
away the result". The most difficult part is finding a suitable name for 
the command line option, I guess.

But, is it really needed? Writing data to /dev/null makes ddrescue 
slower or something? More options make it easier for the user to make a 
mistake, as already happened with the "--generate-logfile" option.


Best regards,
Antonio.