[Thread starts at https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2020-03/msg00008.html] > Remains to be seen why 'dd' hangs...
When I debug the command dd bs=1 seek=8G of=big < /dev/null I find that it is looping here: skip at dd.c:1923..1946 dd_copy at dd.c:2190 main at dd.c:2552 and each loop round takes ca. 0.00055 seconds under gdb. At this speed, it will take more than 14971 years to read and write the 2^33 bytes one by one. No wonder that I did not see it terminate when I waited only a couple of hours... Bruno
