I always thought dd stood for disk destroyer, only ever used it for making low level copies of whole disks or shredding them with if=/dev/random. This thread has been informative and terrifying as I learn cat and cp are every bit as dangerous as dd! I never would expect something like cp xxx /dev/sda to actually work. Thinking about it, why should cp even support something like that? I'll copy files but I'll also DESTROY YOUR SHIT if you say so?
> I never would expect something like cp xxx /dev/sda to actually work. Thinking about it, why should cp even support something like that? I'll copy files but I'll also DESTROY YOUR SHIT if you say so?
That's the beauty of Unix.
Everything is a file. Thus every program that can work with files, can in fact work with everything.
That's the Unix way: The customer, eh, user is always right.
I once wanted to clean up backup files created by emacs (they end in the tilde character) by typing "rm <asterisk>~" - except what I did type was "rm <asterisk> ~".
(On the upside, I learned a valuable lesson that day.)
