tag 13135 notabug thanks On 12/10/2012 07:58 AM, Cojocaru Alexandru wrote: > bash$ yes $(for i in $(seq 1 100000); do echo -n a; done) | dd of=big-lines ibs=100001 count=10000 > 9924+76 records in Thanks for the report. Based on this output, short reads occurred. dd transferred exactly 10000 reads as requested, but since some of those were short, it transferred less than 10000*100001 bytes. This is expected (and the behavior is described in that way by POSIX); the solution you are looking for is to _also_ use the iconv=fullblock option, to force dd to re-read until it has a full input block rather than immediately transferring short input reads to output. As such, I'm closing this as not a bug. Do feel free to add further comments to this thread, though, if you have more questions about why dd does this. Oh, and by the way, 'echo -n' is not portable. You want to use printf(1) instead. -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org