Re: portable use of 'dd'

[Karl Berry]

    Therefore I would suggest to add 'dd' among the "safe" utilities.

Granted that dd is certainly more portable than head -c, are we now
using it in configure/make such that it has to be listed in the coding
standards node? 

I've never thought of that list in Utilities in Makefiles as being all
"utilities whose existence can be assumed everywhere", but rather
"utilities which need to exist to bootstrap a system".