Dd (Unix)

dd
Original author(s)Ken Thompson
(AT&T Bell Laboratories)
Developer(s)Various open-source and commercial developers
Initial releaseJune 1974; 50 years ago (1974-06)
Repositorycoreutils: git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/
Written inPlan 9: C
Operating systemUnix, Unix-like, Plan 9, Inferno, Windows
PlatformCross-platform
TypeCommand
Licensecoreutils: GPLv3+
Plan 9: MIT License

dd is a command-line utility for Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and Unix-like operating systems and beyond, the primary purpose of which is to convert and copy files.[1] On Unix, device drivers for hardware (such as hard disk drives) and special device files (such as /dev/zero and /dev/random) appear in the file system just like normal files; dd can also read and/or write from/to these files, provided that function is implemented in their respective driver. As a result, dd can be used for tasks such as backing up the boot sector of a hard drive, and obtaining a fixed amount of random data. The dd program can also perform conversions on the data as it is copied, including byte order swapping and conversion to and from the ASCII and EBCDIC text encodings.[2]

  1. ^ Austin Group. "POSIX standard: dd invocation". Archived from the original on 2010-03-10. Retrieved 2016-09-29.
  2. ^ Chessman, Sam. "How and when to use the dd command?". CodeCoffee. Archived from the original on 14 Feb 2008. Retrieved 2008-02-19.