From: Geoff Steckel <gwes@oat.com>
Subject: Re: dd commas
To: tech@openbsd.org
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2024 15:35:16 -0500

On 11/18/24 14:50, Tobias Heider wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2024 at 01:36:55PM GMT, joshua stein wrote:
>> Maybe someone else will find this useful, but when I ^T dd and see
>> output like 1257557196800, I have to highlight three digits at a
>> time in my terminal for my brain to understand if it's at hundreds
>> of gigabytes or in terabytes.
> I have often wished it was human readable by default and print a more
> reasonable unit than Bytes, but this is definitely a step in the right
> direction.
>
>> Before:
>>
>>      11994+0 records in
>>      11993+0 records out
>>      1257557196800 bytes transferred in 5017.398 secs (250659198 bytes/sec)
>>
>> After:
>>
>>      11994+0 records in
>>      11993+0 records out
>>      1,257,557,196,800 bytes transferred in 5017.398 secs (250,659,198 bytes/sec)
>>
a) if this formatting is useful here, does it belong in a library?
b) the final printout from dd has been the same for a long time
    some scripts may depend on reading # bytes
c) turning the commas on or off might wander into LC_ land
    or adding a switch to dd

Geoff Steckel