dd: ok, very stupid

[Simon Dawson]

a bug in the wetware perhaps.. but didn't know the correct address (not in 
man/info etc)

I was not drinking enough coffee or getting enough sleep last night, when I 
decided to make a boot disk and upgrade my system.  So, to copy the image 
onto the floppy, I used the familiar command

dd if=./boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k

except, I typed -this-:

dd if=./boot.img of=/dev/hda


uhh, yes. Now, what I was thinking (& I've had a bit of time to think, as 
my drive e2fsck'd and fdisk'd), I imagine that copying things over the MBR 
on your hd is probably not a very common occurrence. I realise I'm coming 
at this from a relative newbie perspective, but how reasonable would it be 
to just put a msg in there saying "Are you SURE you want to overwrite your 
hda mbr?" - with perhaps a -q option for scripting purposes (if necessary).

Just a thought, I imagine I'm not the only person who's shot themselves in 
the foot over this one..

Regards

Simon

ps. looking in `info dd` and the option "swap" is mistyped "swab".. 
although probably a useful command to have around (particularly for 
cleaning up messes), I suspect this is a typo :)