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.
>