Package: pv Version: 1.6.0-1 Severity: wishlist -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
pv's --skip-errors behavior is currently to try skipping 1 byte a few times, then 2 bytes a few times, then 1 byte a few more (because it was at 14 bytes), then 4 a few, then... blah blah, until it finally finishes by skipping 512 bytes 7 times; all in all, I counted 25 attempts, totaling of course 4k. Because it's a disk, with 4k sectors. Bad blocks on the disk, fundamentally, can not be smaller than 4k. (Nor larger, really, but of course you can have two in a row.) This wouldn't be a huge deal, except that disks take forever attempting to read bad sectors. 30 seconds per failed read is quite possible (some take longer, actually, and Linux times out, then you get to wait through a reset cycle, though strictly speaking that's admin error in failing to raise the Linux timeout) I'm not sure if there is *any* storage device which can have a 1-byte error. Wikipedia tells me there were once floppy formats with 128-byte sectors. It was apparently common enough with 8-inch and even 5ΒΌ-inch floppies. (Did floppies have error-detecting codes? No idea). Also, I think without O_DIRECT, you can't actually get a bad block smaller than Linux's page size of 4k. So really it seems like -E ought to just skip 4k at once. Or at least there ought to be an option to specify the skip size. I'd suggest -E should take an optional argument, the skip size, and default to 4k. - -- System Information: Debian Release: stretch/sid APT prefers unstable-debug APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (130, 'unstable'), (120, 'experimental'), (1, 'experimental-debug') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.6.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages pv depends on: ii libc6 2.24-3 pv recommends no packages. Versions of packages pv suggests: ii doc-base 0.10.7 - -- no debconf information -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iFwEARECABwFAlf0UwcVHGFudGhvbnlAZGVyb2JlcnQubmV0AAoJEPs/iMJV6ln+ uVUAniIVKf8qQWiweAEMRlrXA15iTG5kAJkBhpKsCm0E9hKyNrObR5F/DtQpWg== =EH8x -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
