Subject: bug#17505: dd statistics output

From: Linda Walsh <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 14:09:23 -0700

Found old bug, still open...

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 07/16/2014 10:38 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>   
>> 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.
----
    One patch that would not be inconsistent:

    If the user uses units of a single system (i.e. doesn't use 'si' and 
b2 units
in same statement), then display the summary units using the same 
notation the
user used:

dd if=xx bs=256M
...(256M copied)....
vs.
dd if=xx bs=256MB
...(256MB copied)...

> Note another reason to _not_ apply the patch is that
> requests to print the statistics can come async through SIGUSR1,
> and thus increase the chances of inconsistent output.
Solves this too, since the units are decided when the command is parsed,
so SIGUSR would use the same units as would come out on a final summary.

Or is using consistent units w/what the user users not ok?

Note, for statements w/o units (or mixed system), there would be no 
reason to change
current behavior.