[Bug 893036] New: man page for dd documents arguments that work (or make sense)
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=893036 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=893036#c0 Summary: man page for dd documents arguments that work (or make sense) Classification: openSUSE Product: openSUSE 13.1 Version: Final Platform: All OS/Version: openSUSE 13.1 Status: NEW Severity: Normal Priority: P5 - None Component: Basesystem AssignedTo: bnc-team-screening@forge.provo.novell.com ReportedBy: Greg.Freemyer@gmail.com QAContact: qa-bugs@suse.de Found By: --- Blocker: --- User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.143 Safari/537.36 I'm not sure if this is a documentation or functional bug or even a simple user error. The man page for dd documents flags: directory, noatime, and nofollow The implication is that this command should do something, although I admit to not knowing what I expect it to do:
dd if=tmp/ iflag=directory,noatime,nofollow of=tmp1/ oflag=directory
In my test tmp/ is a small directory with 2 files in it. tmp1/ does not exist, so I'm expecting dd to create it. That is a pure guess on my part. The whole concept of dd allowing directories as either input or output objects is foreign to me. If this actually has a real use case, having an example of how to use it would be nice. If it only works on non-linux OSes, then a note to that effect would also be great. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
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Hylton Conacher
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Bernhard Wiedemann
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Bernhard Voelker
The man page is really confusing when no examples are given using these flags. As someone new to the cli, the lack of information could be disastrous.
Pleas read to the end of the man page: SEE ALSO The full documentation for dd is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and dd programs are properly installed at your site, the command info coreutils 'dd invocation' should give you access to the complete manual. As for many GNU projects, the real documentation goes into the Texinfo manual, and the man page is basically identical to the output out --help (actually the man page is generated from that). -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
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--- Comment #4 from Bernhard Voelker
I have never seen dd being used with dirs either.
The Linux kernel doesn't allow reading directories; other UNIX kernels permit that, but the outcome is the binary representation of the directory which even may contain file system specific bits. Therefore, the directory option really is of limited use, which is documented in the Texinfo manual: `directory' Fail unless the file is a directory. Most operating systems do not allow I/O to a directory, so this flag has limited utility. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
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--- Comment #5 from Bernhard Voelker
The Linux kernel doesn't allow reading directories; other UNIX kernels permit that, but the outcome is the binary representation of the directory which even may contain file system specific bits. Therefore, the directory option really is of limited use [...]
Here's Padraig's (coreutils maintainer) answer: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2014-08/msg00032.html -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
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--- Comment #6 from Greg Freemyer
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Philipp Thomas
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Philipp Thomas
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Greg Freemyer
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