[plug] burning an iso image to CD

Cameron Patrick cameron at patrick.wattle.id.au
Fri Feb 27 20:18:07 WST 2004


[Mike: Sorry if you get this message twice - it was supposed to go to
the plug list but I hit the wrong key. :(]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 12:37:46PM +0800, Mike Holland wrote:

| Is there any reason for using dd (with its evil non-unix syntax) rather
| than plain old 'cp' ? (Or cat even.)

It's possible that cp would attempt to create a new cdrom device
rather than copy the data; it won't with the default options, though.
dd can also be useful when you can't easily redirect stdout; e.g.

tar cf - . | ssh somewhere dd of=blah.tar

(Saves escaping > characters and wondering whether or not they'll
work.  I think in this case they will, but...)

|  I see that a lot, sometimes specifying block size, but it doesnt seem to
| make any difference, at least with modern kernels.

An earlier thread resulted in a claim that specifying a block size can
make things faster, but without giving any hard evidence on the
matter.  I'd be curious to see the results of such a test, but not
curious enough to actually run one myself :-)

Cameron.



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