Subject: dd could replace rawrite
To: NetBSD tech-userlevel <tech-userlevel@netbsd.org>
From: James K. Lowden <jklowden@schemamania.org>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 10/10/2003 02:42:32
Because I don't like rawrite32, I ported dd(1) to Win32.  That entailed
porting a fair bit of libc and introducing some Microsoftisms, but all is
otherwise well.  It wasn't particularly hard, and required calling just
two win32 functions.  The rest was include file adjustments.  

It was weird but gratifying to see getopt(3) and vwarnx(3) do their magic
in a win32 shell.  Even va_arg & Co. worked without modification.  The
resulting binary is some 145 KB, including debugging information.  

The only other dd for windows I know about is unxutils on source forge. 
It's GPL, and it can't write straight to the floppy device.  It can only
create files.  

What I'd like to see is "dd for windows" as part of the i386 install CD,
and the documentation modified to suggest people use that to create their
floppies.  It seems to me it would be nice to be able to generate the
win32 binary right from the tree  as part of creating the install sets. 
That would entail the somewhat radical step of introducing "#if WIN32"
into some dozen files.  

Doubtless there are other points of view.  I'm writing here to say it
works, and to ask if there's any possibility of such patches being
accepted.  

--jkl