On 22/02/2022 17:03, Paul Eggert wrote:
While looking into Bug#45648 I noticed that the GNU extensions count_bytes, seek_bytes, and skip_bytes are confusing, and the proposed fix to bug#45648 would make them even more confusing. To fix this confusion, we should deprecate these options, and instead say that if you want to use byte counts you should use a number string ending in "B".Here's another way to put it. Currently this: dd oseek=100KiB means "seek 102,400 blocks". It should simply mean "seek 102,400 bytes", which is what it says. And if we change oseek's meaning this way, we don't need "oseek_bytes". Although this is an incompatible change to GNU dd, I don't think it'll affect real-world uses (who would use oseek in such a confusing way now?) and overall it will be a win.
That is a more concise and direct way to achieve the same functionality. +1 I guess we should remove docs for the other options, but leave support there for backwards compat. thanks, Pádraig
