Step#2 Create a copy of the bootload and partition table!

Will automatically take the size of the file but longer, usefull only if in an function.

The previously-posted one-liner didn't work for me for whatever reason, so I ended up doing this instead.

Keep width to a power of 2 to see patterns emerge. 512 is good. So is 4096 for huge maps. PNM headers are super basic. http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbm.html Show Sample Output

dd can be used with /dev/zero to easily create a file of all zero-bytes. Pipe that through tr and use octal conversions to change the byte values from zero to 0xff (octal 0377). You can replace 0377 with the byte of your choice. You can also use \\0 and \\377 instead of the quoted version.

Write 200 blocks of 512k to a dummy file with dd, timing the result. The is useful as a quick test to compare the performance of different file systems. Show Sample Output

removes all files/filesystems of a harddisk. It removes EVERYTHING of your hard disk. Be carefull when to select a device. It does not prompt for and second check. Show Sample Output

Scope should have the Rigol Ultravision Technology otherwise it won't accept the command. ImageMagic is required. Scope sends a 1.1M BMP file and converted to PNG it's only 18-20K

Alternatively, if your password can contain a richer character set, try using 'uuencode' rather than base64. dd if=/dev/urandom bs=16 count=1 2>/dev/null | uuencode - Sample of that: '0:.CF\-@"\`W315VG^4O\.@``' Show Sample Output

I know there are a lot of random password generators out there, but I wanted something that put out something besides hex. Set count equal to the number of bytes you want. Show Sample Output

If you don't want your computer to try to boot form a USB stick that used to be used as a boot device (maybe for a live linux distro), you will have to remove the boot loader from your stick other wise the boot will fail each time the device is attached to your PC.

Note, the [remotePort] should be opened in the firewall first. First, start the destination box listening, then fire off the sending box. Data from the /dev/zero device in memory of the source machine is read out using dd, sent over the network with nc, and read back in from the other side of the network with nc, going to the /dev/null device. Essentially, it is a memory-network-memory copy operation, the output of dd will tell you how fast your network really is performing.

Let dd use direct I/O to write directly to the disk without any caching. You'll encounter very different results with different block sizes (try with 1k, 4k, 1M, ... and appropriate count values).

Create a bunch of random files with random binary content. Basically dd dumps randomly from your hard disk to files random-file*. Show Sample Output

Mac OS X needs some clean up. First command works in Linux, Solaris just needs the "0000000"'s removed Show Sample Output

Use this if you're using vi editing mode. Example use : sudo vim /root/bin/ ##uh... autocomplete doesn't work... dd sudo ls /root/bin ##ah! that's the name of the file! <p> sudo vim /root/bin/ ##resume here! Thanks readline!