Christian Groessler writes:
>
> 268435456 bytes (256 MB) copied, ...  
>

This would be a clear violation of the SI standard, which says on its prefixes:

"These SI prefixes refer strictly to powers of 10. They should not be used to indicate powers of 2 (for example, one kilobit represents 1000 bits and not 1024 bits). The IEC has adopted prefixes for binary powers in the international standard IEC 60027-2: 2005, third edition, Letter symbols to be used in electrical technology – Part 2: Telecommunications and electronics. The names and symbols for the prefixes corresponding to 210, 220, 230, 240, 250, and 260 are, respectively: kibi, Ki; mebi, Mi; gibi, Gi; tebi, Ti; pebi, Pi; and exbi, Ei. Thus, for example, one kibibyte would be written: 1 KiB = 210 B = 1024 B, where B denotes a byte. Although these prefixes are not part of the SI, they should be used in the field of information technology to avoid the incorrect usage of the SI prefixes." [1, page 121]

I would second Pádraig Bradys:
>
>  268435456 bytes (256 MiB) copied, 0.0248346 s, 10.8 GB/s
>

Or as neither bit nor byte are SI units, one might even keep all IEC units in IEC binary prefix as such:

>
>  268435456 bytes (256 MiB) copied, 0.0248346 s, 10.1 GiB/s
>

Best regards
Henrik Juul Pedersen

[1] http://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si_brochure_8_en.pdf


On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 11:38 AM, Pádraig Brady <P@draigbrady.com> wrote:
On 07/16/2014 03:45 AM, Christian Groessler wrote:
> Hi,
>
> the final output of 'dd' is in "SI mode" (or how to call it). It uses 10^6 instead of 2^20 for "megabyte".
>
> Example:
>
> $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=65536 count=4096
> 4096+0 records in
> 4096+0 records out
> 268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 0.0248346 s, 10.8 GB/s
> $
>
> Is there a switch to display in "traditional" units, I'd like to have
>
> 268435456 bytes (256 MB) copied, ...

http://bugs.gnu.org/17505#37 was proposed do the following automatically (depending on the amount output):

  268435456 bytes (256 MiB) copied, 0.0248346 s, 10.8 GB/s

However that wasn't applied due to inconsistency concerns.
I'm still of the opinion that the change above would be a net gain,
as the number in brackets is for human interpretation, and in the vast
majority of cases would be the best representation for that.

Pádraig.