Once upon a time, William M. Quarles <walrus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> said: > So, if I'm trying to write all ones to a drive, I'd want to do this? > tr '\00' '\77' </dev/zero >/dev/hdb The backslash escapes are in octal, so you would want: tr '\0' '\377' < /dev/zero > /dev/hdb > Looks like that will take a lot longer than dd, because it's only > reading in one byte at a time. The reading isn't really a problem, but the writing might be. You could pipe it through dd to get blocking like: tr '\0' '\377' < /dev/zero | dd bs=1M of=/dev/hdb > If you are suggesting that I try the complement function I don't see how > that helps. Then again, I don't know what you are suggesting, since > "man tr" doesn't communicate anything other than, "you are ignorant Mr. > Quarles, go educate your self on this command called 'tr.'" Well, I'm > not as ignorant as I was a few minutes ago, but I am still lost. Could > you please volunteer a little more information now? Sorry, didn't really mean to be that short; just kind of a reaction to your "that's not what I want" short responses (but that isn't really an excuse). Between that and not having any sleep (not enough sleep Sunday and Monday nights, last night I was on call and paged every 30 minutes except when the thunderstorm came through and then had to come in at 3:30am to do system maintenance), I was kind of cranky. The other nice thing about using the second command with "dd" above is that you can send a USR1 signal to dd to get a progress report. Go to another console or window, find the PID of the dd command, and do "kill -USR1 [dd pid]" and dd will print how far it has gotten (how many blocks, which in the above example would be megabytes). -- Chris Adams <cmadams@xxxxxxxxxx> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.
