Please forgive the inconvenience.
Attaching a gzipped patch file
ensures the integrity of patch file content.
I should have presented only the idea
rather than a patch for the implementation.
I concur dd is already suited to the task.
Please consider
| sed 's/^/if=/' | xargs -r --max-lines=1 dd iflag=direct # in contrast with
| xargs -r --max-lines=4096 cat -d --
Invoking dd 466059 times costs only a slight performance decrease
as compared with invoking cat 114 times.
However, this example probably represents rare usage for cat.