There’s nothing specially destructive about dd. It’s just a program that opens a file, and if you tell it to open a device file and it’s got permission to write to it, it’ll write to it.
You can just as easily overwrite a disk’s contents with anything else that will open a file and write to it.
# cp /dev/urandom /dev/sda
will wipe your drive with random data in the same way that
I quadruple check and then I still don’t run it because I’m too nervous so I go and do something else instead and the item remains buried on my to-do list indefinitely.
Lol, as someone who tried a bunch of different distros, I used the dd command a lot without ever realizing what could go wrong with it. I must have used up all my luck with that though, because somehow I ended up on manjaro of all things.
My last Arch death was updating my 128GB laptop after a year and breaking it with partial updates. (I’m better at partial updates now)
It also made me want to, move away from having separate /home partition. It was somewhat sad, since it was the Arch that I installed on the previous laptop and just moved the SSD when I got a new one
I’m here for a good time, not a long time
Also, my last Arch death was due to accidentally ovverwritimg the whole drive, so no amount of split partitions is going to save me
They call it disk destroyer for a reason. You gotta alias that shit.
alias dd='echo Did you triple check which device you picked? Of course not, dipshit. Check again'There’s nothing specially destructive about
dd. It’s just a program that opens a file, and if you tell it to open a device file and it’s got permission to write to it, it’ll write to it.You can just as easily overwrite a disk’s contents with anything else that will open a file and write to it.
will wipe your drive with random data in the same way that
will.
You’re technically right, but the way most people use dd ensures its like handling a loaded gun. How often do you cp /dev/sdwhy?
Hahahahah I need to do that lmao!!!
Surely double checked is enough
It’s not. Neither is triple checking. Notice how the alias doesn’t actually run
dd? That’s on purpose.I quadruple check and then I still don’t run it because I’m too nervous so I go and do something else instead and the item remains buried on my to-do list indefinitely.
Lol, as someone who tried a bunch of different distros, I used the dd command a lot without ever realizing what could go wrong with it. I must have used up all my luck with that though, because somehow I ended up on manjaro of all things.
My last Arch death was updating my 128GB laptop after a year and breaking it with partial updates. (I’m better at partial updates now) It also made me want to, move away from having separate /home partition. It was somewhat sad, since it was the Arch that I installed on the previous laptop and just moved the SSD when I got a new one