Can't I get a /dev/one?

[William M. Quarles]

Cool, thanks.

Chris Adams wrote:
> 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).