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bug#54112: dd seek_bytes etc. is confusing


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: bug#54112: dd seek_bytes etc. is confusing
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2022 09:03:46 -0800
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/91.5.0

While looking into Bug#45648 I noticed that the GNU extensions count_bytes, seek_bytes, and skip_bytes are confusing, and the proposed fix to bug#45648 would make them even more confusing. To fix this confusion, we should deprecate these options, and instead say that if you want to use byte counts you should use a number string ending in "B".

Here's another way to put it.  Currently this:

   dd oseek=100KiB

means "seek 102,400 blocks". It should simply mean "seek 102,400 bytes", which is what it says. And if we change oseek's meaning this way, we don't need "oseek_bytes".

Although this is an incompatible change to GNU dd, I don't think it'll affect real-world uses (who would use oseek in such a confusing way now?) and overall it will be a win.





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