Subject: Re: bug#12489: inconsistent output from 'dd' w/rt stats and suppression.

From: Linda Walsh <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2012 16:17:58 -0700

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?