[sclug] dd pain

[Jonathan H N Chin]

Roland Turner <raz.fpyht.bet.hx at raz.cx> wrote:
> On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 09:14:40AM +0100, pieter claassen wrote:
> > 1. Can anybody think of a practical way to see how dd is doing in terms
> > of progress. Unfortunately it currently only tells me on completion that
> > all is fine or not.

debian has the cstream package:

 |Description: general-purpose stream-handling tool similar to dd
 | cstream is a general-purpose stream-handling tool like UNIX' dd,
 | usually used in commandline-constructed pipes.
 | .
 | Features:
 |  - Sane commandline switch syntax.
 |  - Exact throughput limiting, on the incoming side. Timing variance in
 |    previous reads are counterbalanced in the following reads.
*|  - Precise throughput reporting. Either at the end of the transmission
 |    or everytime SIGUSR1 is received. Quite useful to ask lengthy
 |    opertions how much data has been transferred yet, i.e. when
 |    writing tapes. Reports are done in bytes/sec and if appropriate in
 |    KB/sec or MB/sec, where 1K = 1024.
 |  - SIGUSR2 causes a clean shutdown before EOF on input, timing
 |    informating is displayed.
 |  - Build-in support to write its PID to a file, for painless sending of
 |    these signals.
 |  - Build-in support for fifos. Example usage is a 'pseudo-device',
 |    something that sinks or delivers data at an appropriate rate, but
 |    looks like a file, i.e. if you test soundcard software. See the
 |    manpage for examples.
 |  - Built-in data creation and sink, no more redirection of /dev/null
 |    and /dev/zero. These special devices speed varies greatly among
 |    operating systems, redirecting from it isn't appropriate
 |    benchmarking and a waste of resources anyway.
 |  - Accepts 'k', 'm' and 'g' character after number for "kilo, mega,
 |    giga" bytes for overall data size limit.
 |  - "gcc -Wall" clean source code, serious effort taken to avoid
 |    undefined behaviour in ANSI C or POSIX, except long long is
 |    required. Limiting and reporting works on data amounts > 4 GB.



> > 3. Can anybody think of a faster more optimised and safer way to do
> > this? I find that sometimes I stare for minutes at the screen to make

I didn't notice the original message, so I don't know the question.
partimage perhaps?

|Description: Linux/UNIX utility to save partitions in a compressed image file
| Partition Image is a Linux/UNIX partition imaging utility: it saves partitions
| in the Ext2FS  (the linux standard), ReiserFS (a new journaled and powerful
| file system), NTFS (Windows NT File System)  or FAT16/32 (DOS & Windows file
| systems) file system formats to an image file. Only used blocks are copied.
| The image file can be compressed in the GZIP/BZIP2 formats to save disk space,
| and split into multiple files to be copied onto removable media (ZIP for
| example), burned on a CD-R, etc.
| .
| This makes it possible to save a full Linux/Windows system with a single
| operation.  In case of a problem (virus, crash, error, etc.), you just have
| to restore, and after several minutes, your entire system is restored
| (boot, files, etc.), and fully working.
| .
| This is very useful when installing the same software on many machines: just
| install one of them, create an image, and just restore the image on all other
| machines. Then, after the first one, each installation is automatic made,
| and requires only a few minutes.


-jonathan

-- 
Jonathan H N Chin, 1 dan | deputy computer | Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK
<jc254 at newton.cam.ac.uk> | systems mangler | tel/fax: +44 1223 335986/330508

                "respondeo etsi mutabor" --Rosenstock-Huessy