[PATCH] dd status= option not documented in Info file

[Andrew Church]

To whom it may concern,

I recently noticed that the "status=noxfer" option to dd, which is
documented in the man page, is missing from the Info documentation as of
at least coreutils-7.1 (and possibly earlier).  I don't know whether this
is intentional, but on the assumption it's not, I've included a patch
below that adds a basic description of the option to "coreutils.texi".
Of course, feel free to make the change in a different way, or not at all.

As a side note, I find it somewhat curious that the default is to display
the "xfer" information.  While my own experience is hardly enough to draw
generalizations from, in the vast majority of cases in which I use dd, I
find the information extraneous clutter--I can tell from the blocks in/out
lines the amount of data transferred, and the transfer speed is of no
relevance.  (I locally use a separate patch, at
    http://achurch.org/patch-pile/coreutils/7.1/dd-noxfer-default.diff
to disable this extra information by default and allow it to be displayed
with "status=xfer" instead.)  Out of curiosity, was there a particular
reason for this information to be displayed by default?

  --Andrew Church
    address@hidden
    http://achurch.org/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

diff -urN coreutils-7.1-orig/doc/coreutils.texi coreutils-7.1/doc/coreutils.texi
--- coreutils-7.1-orig/doc/coreutils.texi       2009-02-21 03:34:02 +0900
+++ coreutils-7.1/doc/coreutils.texi    2009-02-22 13:53:26 +0900
@@ -7649,6 +7649,11 @@
 Copy @var{blocks} @samp{ibs}-byte blocks from the input file, instead
 of everything until the end of the file.
 
address@hidden status=noxfer
address@hidden status
+Do not print statistics on bytes transferred and transfer rate (the
+third status line printed when @command{dd} exits).
+
 @item address@hidden,@address@hidden
 @opindex conv
 Convert the file as specified by the @var{conversion} argument(s).