Can't I get a /dev/one?
Chris Adams
cmadams at hiwaay.net
Wed Jul 14 11:36:30 UTC 2004
Once upon a time, William M. Quarles <walrus at bellsouth.net> 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 at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.
More information about the fedora-list
mailing list