Cool, thanks.
Chris Adams wrote:
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).
