From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Subject: Re: writing 96b image to floppy Date: 28 Jun 1992 06:58:02 GMT
In article <709500596snx@hectic.demon.co.uk> mike@hectic.demon.co.uk (Mike Davies) writes:
>
>I'm getting worried about this. I always do 'cp Image /dev/PS0',
>and it works fine. Everybody else uses dd. Can someone tell me
>if I'm doing a *very bad* thing ?
cp works fine, but dd was a /lot/ faster with the old floppy driver that
didn't do track buffering. With the current kernel there's not too much
difference between cp and dd, so you can safely use cp now. (Another
reason I use dd in the kernel Makefile is that some old version of GNU
cp "optimized" the copying by not copying zeros (doing a lseek() over
them instead), which works fine on regular files but breaks on special
files like /dev/PS0. Newer cp's don't have this problem)
Linus