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view wisdom/block device @ 9959:a4d641009dc5
<hppavilion[1]> learn Svalbard is the place where Norway keeps the seeds for its pseudo-RNGs so that they can recover their language if it is ever lost.
author | HackBot |
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date | Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:45:03 +0000 |
parents | 272663b31668 |
children |
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Block devices are a concession made in Unix to make raw hard disks and magnetic tape have a similar interface to regular files and terminals. Since magnetic tapes can't write individual bytes, only entire blocks, the interface isn't exactly the same, thus the dreaded dd obs= option was born.