On 10/22/2013 02:14 PM, Bernhard Voelker wrote: >> On October 22, 2013 at 1:03 PM Pádraig Brady <[email protected]> wrote: >> On 10/22/2013 11:26 AM, Bernhard Voelker wrote: >> > To avoid that this question comes up again: should we add >> > this into the Texinfo file? >> >> Maybe, though we have to be careful of coupling the >> docs too tightly with the code. >> Worth a source comment at least. > > Ctually, this question came up on a discussion on the > opensuse-factory mailing list [1]. > It'd be good to be able to point end users to some documentation > they can easily access. Therefore, I thought that the info > pages would be the right place. > WDYT? > > [1] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-10/msg00565.html
That thread could just link to: http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/dd-invocation.html and the count= description which references iflag=fullblock, should explain the short read situation adequately I think? The runtime warning conditions were chosen to be conservative, and only trigger when a short read is confirmed to have occurred, in a probably unintended situation, rather than flagging potential issues with different inputs files etc. Now we might add various extra up front messages about potential gotchas in dd usage when conv=debug was specified (akin to sort --debug). Given that I have trouble remembering the edge cases sometimes (like I did for sort), it might be worth adding. thanks, Pádraig.
