Linux Magazine: Performing Data Surgery

“A year ago, the November 2003 ‘Power Tools’ column… looked
into some lesser-known tools for editing text: the line editors ex
and ed, and the stream editor sed.

“This month, let’s dig deeper and see some uses for the
almost-unknown utility dd — which has many more uses than just
reading data from magnetic tapes (one of its most common uses in
years past). On the way, we’ll touch upon the better-known editing
utilities head and tail, the ‘octal dump’ utility od, the
/dev/random device, and more…”

Complete
Story