Paul Eggert wrote:

On 09/22/2012 12:09 PM, Linda Walsh wrote:

shouldn't it just suppress the whole message,
or what's the point?


I think the main point of status=noxfer is to get
GNU dd to behave more like traditional dd does.
Admittedly this should be documented better.

I don't know about a traditional 'dd'.

I just need a switch that turns off the superfluous output, which I thought
was the point of 'noxfer', I don't have another 'dd' to compare it to.

This seems to be a trend in the documentation... with 'rm', there is no
mention of "." being special and not working as a target as it does in
'cp' or 'rsync' or 'tar' -- one would have to go find the latest edition of
posix, or find what the posix version of the moment is that a given util is
supposed to be following...

That right there should be a hint that POSIX isn't following standards -- since
the documentation hasn't been altered to reflect the newer changes.

My version of 'rm' still has "--force" -- which says to ignore nonexistent files never prompt. It also used to ignore write protected files and give
no error messages. giving -f was a way to shut it up about anything it
couldn't remove.

It no longer does that.

Despite what some people think there have been multiple changes recently enough
in the gnu utils that the documentation hasn't caught up.

So is this superfluous output with 'dd' required by POSIX is that why it has to be displayed now? Otherwise, I think if the user wants to turn off transfer
statistics -- they mean all of them the blocks read in, blocks written out, and
the summary and speed line.

Maybe add a 'status=nosum' for just the statistics on Input and output but with no summary or speed?