Nerd trivia of the day: ever wondered why the dd CLI UI is so much different from the rest of gnu coreutils tools?
No hyphens before operands, weird "=" symbol all over the place.
Turns out this UI was originally meant to be a prank: it uses the IBM JCL[1] notation. A language used on systems which happened to be shipped with a similar tool.
50 years later, the tool is still here, the prank is still here, but nobody gets it anymore: it just became a weird UX annoyance. 😅
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20181213051044/https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/dd.html
More infos and trivia on the **terrific** wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Control_Language
⠴PicNoir⠦ (was Ninjatrappeur) /
npub1pa…6v4dp
2024-03-11 10:48:28
Author Public Key
npub1payzd4g5lrpxkl2f20sku8ae3qxz9rkxd8cynnjagexglj2ap9qs86v4dpPublished at
2024-03-11 10:48:28Event JSON
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"content": "Nerd trivia of the day: ever wondered why the dd CLI UI is so much different from the rest of gnu coreutils tools?\n\nNo hyphens before operands, weird \"=\" symbol all over the place.\n\nTurns out this UI was originally meant to be a prank: it uses the IBM JCL[1] notation. A language used on systems which happened to be shipped with a similar tool.\n\n50 years later, the tool is still here, the prank is still here, but nobody gets it anymore: it just became a weird UX annoyance. 😅\n\nSource: https://web.archive.org/web/20181213051044/https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/dd.html\n\nMore infos and trivia on the **terrific** wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)\n\n[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Control_Language",
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