Re: dd: add 'skip_bytes' and 'count_bytes' operands

[Jérémy Compostella]

[...]

> > Hmm, that's not too bad at all really

> I do agree, it looks like a very interesting idea indeed. However, I

> have two questions:

> 1. Why skip=2b => 1024 blocks ?

> 2. Do you know if there is a utility function somewhere in coreutils or

> gnulib which could help me to parse this ? If such a function exists it

> could be able to manage more units (bytes, kbytes, megabytes, ...). If

> have to write such a function we have to discuss the possibilities I have to

> provide.

About #2, I was thinking that we could be consistent with the truncate --size

option for example. Adding the missing B for bytes.

truncate --size option documentation extract:

      ‘KB’ => 1000 (KiloBytes)

      ‘K’ => 1024 (KibiBytes)

      ‘MB’ => 1000*1000 (MegaBytes)

      ‘M’ => 1024*1024 (MebiBytes)

      ‘GB’ => 1000*1000*1000 (GigaBytes)

      ‘G’ => 1024*1024*1024 (GibiBytes)

and so on for ‘T’, ‘P’, ‘E’, ‘Z’, and ‘Y’.

Cheers,

Jérémy