#1103730 coreutils: dd man page does not mention useful option iflag=skip_bytes.

Package:
coreutils
Source:
coreutils
Description:
GNU core utilities
Submitter:
Giles Atkinson
Date:
2025-04-21 11:36:01 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#1103730#5
Date:
2025-04-21 06:03:38 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

Problem as described in title.  Found while trying to trim the shell part
from a horrible installation script with a few hundred lines of shell script
followed by 900Mb of binary.  (Installer for Microchip "MPLAB X IDE",
from which I want just a few shared libraries.)

It seems the ordinary dd option to skip requires the use of a 1-byte input
buffer that would take forever, but Stack Exchange came up with this option
that allows an arbitary seek and large buffer.

Many thanks for all the great work.

Giles
#1103730#10
Date:
2025-04-21 11:32:36 UTC
From:
To:
Since coreutils 9.1 skip_bytes is no longer needed.
Instead if the count ends with 'B' it's interpreted as bytes.

cheers,
Pádraig