iflags=fullblock should be the default, shouldn't it?

[Marc Weber]

Today I tried this :

cat -A /dev/zero | dd bs=1M count=1000 of=/dev/null;

which does copy a different amount of data each time!
The new coreutils-7.1 does introduce the flag iflags=fullblock which
makes the line above copy 1G all the time as it should.

However I really can't imagine any use case for the old default
behaviour not copying full blocks. Can you?

so I consider this beeing a serious bug because you always have to learn
about iflags=fullblock and you have to remember using it. This is just a
waste of human resources..

If you tell me about some use cases I'll shut up immediately.

I think that shell scirpting is such a high level that you should no
longer have to worry about this kind of stuff. If you really do you can
write your own personal dd for such use cases.

So in my opinion there should be an error when using count=$COUNT and
less than $COUNT * ibs bytes have been copied..

So i'd make this fullblock be the default.

Sincerly
Marc Weber