>From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
>On Wed, 18 Dec 1996 14:17:21 -0600 
> "Phil Knaack" <flipk@idea.exnet.iastate.edu> wrote:
> > 	There appeared to be absolutely no way to interrupt the dd process
> > to make this horrible nightmare come to a stop, until it had completed the
> > entire floppy's worth of data.
>
>So, I just tried to reproduce this... I dd'd a floppy image onto a 3.5''
>write protected floppy... I got exactly one "hard error" message, and
>dd promptly exited with an error condition.  [ . . . ]

The number of "hard error" messages probably depends on how many blocks
dd is trying to write.  Ideally, it shouldn't return any.  IMO, the correct
behavior would be to return -1 to the write() requester and set errno to
EROFS (or EIO).  The only error message should be from dd's detection of the
-1 return.

Max