[Toybox] dd man page

[Rob Landley]

On 07/14/2017 05:51 PM, scsijon wrote:
> A lot of this reminds me from my old SCSI and SASI days, and the PDP
> series of minicomputers, where everything internal connected by one or
> the other and these commands were de-rigur to ensure the commands and
> data 'got through' between devices, after all the bus was ribbon cable.
> Both scsi and especially sasi are still out there and going well, just
> under other names.

I started out on a commodore 64. I'm not adding a command to translate
petascii, run commodore basic, or read 1541 floppy images. :)

> However some of these 'obscure' dd settings are used today in the likes
> of firmware updating packages so they are needed. Whether they should
> appear as more than that, such as in documentation details, is something
> to consider.

I can wait for something like that to actually try to get used, break,
and then see whether it's easier to fix their script than this dd
implementation.

Remember: I'm mostly trying to figure out what to do about the non-posix
stuff. If it's in posix, merely being silly isn't enough to yank it.

> And the commands should be and are available to the full dd command,
> whether also in toybox is a moot point, but personally with a little
> thought, I think i'd say "not required!" but I may change my mind later.

I'm leaning not required as well.

> Oh, and yes EBDIC is still used for external devices in the engineering,
> science, chemistry and metalurgy industries for devices reading
> resistance, capacitance and the like, (spectrometric devices come easily
> to mind,) so conv=ascii, ebdic, ibm are still alive so maybe worth
> keeping for the tinkerers out there.

There are still 6 bit devices out there too. I'm not implementing a
conversion for 'em in this dd. There's presumably a "tr" command line
that could do it.

> I'll leave it to you if you want to feed this to the lists or not.

I prefer to have stuff on the list so I can find it again. :)

> regards
> scsijon

Thanks,

Rob