I was told it's IBMese: Define Dataset.

-rob


On Mon, Sep 16, 2024 at 2:01 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

> You know, this is a place that might actually be able to provide a
> definitive answer to me.  A brief web search found me asking the same
> question in 1995.
>
> When I were a wee lad, I was told `dd` was short for `do DEBE`, which,
> while obviously referencing a well-known movie about a Northern Texas
> sports team and their most enthusiastic fan, also referred to the mainframe
> software whose name was an acronym for `Does Everything But Eat` and whose
> function was to copy data across sources with very different blocking and
> representation conventions...which is kinda what `dd` does.
>
> Can anyone here confirm or deny that origin for the utility's name?
>
> Adam
>
> On Sun, Sep 15, 2024 at 3:36 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Sep 16, 2024 at 08:15:34AM +1000, Rob Pike wrote:
>> > For me the fascinating thing about dd is that people tended to use the
>> JCL
>> > notation for its arguments even after the Unix style was made available.
>> > That is, people prefer "dd if=foo" rather than "dd -if foo" or even the
>> > obviously easiest "dd <foo".
>>
>> Muscle memory.  dd is weird but you sort of get used to it and then just
>> do it how you always have.
>>
>