dd curiosity

Mark W. Snitily mark at zok.UUCP
Mon Jan 1 09:08:01 AEST 1990


In article <1989Dec30.233951.23096 at twwells.com> bill at twwells.com (T. William Wells) writes:
>In article <396 at zok.UUCP> mark at zok.UUCP (Mark W. Snitily) writes:
>: But, if I read 4 sectors from the partition starting at sector 20000,
>: the read will take forever to complete, (i.e. we're talking minutes to
>: hours depending upon the skip value):
>:       dd if=/dev/rdsk/0p1 of=myfile skip=20000 count=4
>
>Reads everything from the beginning of /dev/rdsk/0p1 till it gets
>to the place to read.
>
>: Any ideas of how to speed it up?
>
>Use seek instead of skip.

Thanks for the suggestion, but quoting from the manual:
    skip=n   skips n input blocks before starting copy
    seek=n   seek n blocks from beginning of output file before copying

"skip" applies to the input file.  "seek" applies to the output file.
What I'd like to have is a "seek" performed on the input file.
Ideas anyone?

-- Mark

Mark W. Snitily                 Consulting Services:
894 Brookgrove Lane             Graphics, Operating Systems, Compilers
Cupertino, CA 95014             (408) 252-0456
mark at zok.uucp



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