bug#17505: dd statistics output

[Pádraig Brady]

On 07/16/2014 10:38 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 07/16/2014 03:45 AM, Christian Groessler wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> the final output of 'dd' is in "SI mode" (or how to call it). It uses 10^6 
>> instead of 2^20 for "megabyte".
>>
>> Example:
>>
>> $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=65536 count=4096
>> 4096+0 records in
>> 4096+0 records out
>> 268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 0.0248346 s, 10.8 GB/s
>> $
>>
>> Is there a switch to display in "traditional" units, I'd like to have
>>
>> 268435456 bytes (256 MB) copied, ...
> 
> http://bugs.gnu.org/17505#37 was proposed do the following automatically 
> (depending on the amount output):
> 
>   268435456 bytes (256 MiB) copied, 0.0248346 s, 10.8 GB/s
> 
> However that wasn't applied due to inconsistency concerns.
> I'm still of the opinion that the change above would be a net gain,
> as the number in brackets is for human interpretation, and in the vast
> majority of cases would be the best representation for that.

Note another reason to _not_ apply the patch is that
requests to print the statistics can come async through SIGUSR1,
and thus increase the chances of inconsistent output.

thanks,
Pádraig.