Re: dd (coreutils) 5.97 used power of 10 not 2 for calculating MB

[Paul Eggert]

My kneejerk reaction is that there's a lot of complexity there.  Can't
we make it simpler?  Why are there so many options?  Normally, for
example, "human" and "si" are mutually exclusive alternatives, so why
should one specify both "human" and "si"?

> ./dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=512k count=123 display=human dbs=si
> 65M+0 bytes in
> 65M+0 bytes out
> 64487424 bytes (65M) copied, 0,001492 s, 44,0G/s

Here, the "65M" is repeated.  That seems redundant.  Come to think of
it the whole "bytes in/bytes out/bytes copied" thing is redundant.  If
we're going to change the format, surely there's a better way to
change it.

Also, why does this style omit the space between the number and the
units?  The current style has a space there.  That is the usual SI
style (see <http://www.physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/checklist.html> and
look for "space between the numerical value and the unit symbol").  It
would be more consistent with SI practice to report the quantity as
"65 MB" and the transmission rate as "44,0 GB/s".  For powers of two
formats it should be "65 MiB" and "38,0 GiB/s" (or whatever).

> echo $DD_DISPLAY_BLOCK_SIZE

All other things being equal it's better to avoid environment
variables for stuff like this.