Re: [PATCH] dd: add punchhole feature

[Bernhard Voelker]

On 02/14/2017 04:50 AM, Michael Stone wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 07:34:04PM -0800, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> Anyway thanks for the patch.
>> I'm still slightly against merging as it's a guaranteed way
>> to lose data if you ctrl-c the command or whatever.
>> I'll let others weigh in at this point.
> 
> Agreed; this makes much more sense as a special purpose tool than yet 
> one more incomprensible option crammed into dd.

>From a user's point, stdin respectively the if= argument has always
been read-only and therefore safe from unwanted changes in my mind.
The proposed feature doesn't match into this paradigm.
If added to an existing tool, it would make more sense in
util-linux' fallocate(1) - or even better - a dedicated tool.

Have a nice day,
Berny