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Comment by necovek | Hacker News Reader

Having come from the DOS world (or it could have been Norton utilities), I always thought it was more like DiskDupe (duplicate disks).

Funny how we never confirm our hypothesis that "checks out".

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"disk dump" is another common (but wrong) guess.

I always read it as “[disk|data] destroyer”, because that’s what it’ll do if you’re not careful.

You know, this is true. And I've read any number of "you should never use dd, use this instead" articles over the years. But man, do I love me some dd.

dd is the software equivalent of removing the riving knife from a table saw.

Then again, I get very paranoid when I write software that has to delete arbitrary files recursively. One bad string gets in there and it's a very bad day.

One explanation that left a deep impression on me is[1]:

  it stands for 'Copy and Convert' and was renamed to `dd` only because `cc` was reserved for the C compiler!

[1]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/6835/192313

Reminds me of IBM => HAL, just the other direction

APL -> BQN where the author remembered the alphabet wrong : https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/54753804#5...

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