AIX vs GNU core utils tools: the 'dd' command with skip parameter.

Any Linux & Unix admin knowns this fact: GNU tools are MUCH MORE better tools than AIX, BSD, Solaris or HP-UX tools.

GNU tools have much less bugs, much more functionality and options, localization, better documentation, they are standard, most of the scripts are built based on GNU tools, etc, etc,etc. Why the hell they do not throw out their ugly-buggy-limitated tools and install the GNU tools in their systems by default???

Here you have an example of a weird behaviour in the 'dd' command in the AIX platform: With the skip= parameter the 'dd' command skips the blocks, but it actually reads them (no matter if you are working on a filesystem with file random access). So, if you are working with big files (in my case, 50GB) you have to read ALL the blocks in memory before access the requested position. That means huge I/O, usage of memory in cache, etc...

IBM guys: you do not know that there is a lseek(2) function?

Here you have an example of the time that takes read 2MB from a big file, skiping 1000MB. Using native 'dd' command takes 12s:

$ time /usr/bin/dd if=a_big_big_file.data skip=1000 bs=1M count=2 of=/dev/null
2+0 records in.
2+0 records out.

real    0m12.059s
user    0m0.013s
sys     0m1.419s

With GNU's version, less than a second:

$ time /opt/freeware/bin/dd if=a_big_big_file.data skip=1000 bs=1M count=2 of=/dev/null
2+0 records in
2+0 records out

real    0m0.024s
user    0m0.002s
sys     0m0.006s

Note: You can find the GNU's dd tool in AIX Linux ToolBox coreutils package.

*Update: *I contacted the IBM support and they told me that using the option conv=iblock ,"dd" will behave as expected. But IMHO the documentation does not explicitily say that:

iblock,** oblock** Minimize data loss resulting from a read or write error on direct access devices. If you specify the iblock variable and an error occurs during a block read (where the block size is 512 or the size specified by theibs=InputBlockSize variable), the dd command attempts to reread the data block in smaller size units. If the dd command can determine the sector size of the input device, it reads the damaged block one sector at a time. Otherwise, it reads it 512 bytes at a time. The input block size (ibs) must be a multiple of this retry size. This option contains data loss associated with a read error to a single sector. The** oblock** conversion works similarly on output.