Hello,
the wiki on swap ( https://wiki.debian.org/Swap ) states:
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/PATH/FILENAME bs=1024 count=SIZE
> ...
> ...and SIZE is the size you wish your swap file to be in kilobytes (for
> example 1048576 is 1 gigabyte).
>
> This (as stated) is incorrect and will result in dd creating a file way
larger than intended and potentially catastrophic for the system as an
attempted count=1GiB (very modest and as per the wiki example) times
bs=1024 will result in dd writing 1 Terabyte (1024 GiB) of zeros; a
potentially catastrophic action on most ssds/NVMes, especially considering
an attempted 4-8GiB swap file *AND* that dd has to be elevated with
su/sudo/doas.
dd is a very bad piece of software to issue a wrong command with, and
people may not think twice before copying it to a terminal since it is from
the official debian wiki.
I apologize for taking your time with this instead of correcting it myself,
but I tried registering and registration is disabled. I intended to add a
section for creating swapfiles on btrfs (what I originally was looking
for,) and submit a correction to the dd section such as this;
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/PATH/FILENAME bs=1MiB count=TIMESBS
> ...
> ...and TIMESBS is the size you wish your swap file to be in megabytes (for
> example 1024 will result in 1 gigabyte).
>
Thank you,
Anthony.
PS. Apologies for any awkward use of the english language, same as
many others it is my second one.
