Bug 566079

Description of problem:
dd should have a --quiet option to suppress the often unimportant statistical output (ie. 1+0 records in, 1+0 records out, 4096 bytes ...).  Why you might ask?  Because standard error is being used by dd for something other than errors.  If one is to redirect standard error to /dev/null to get rid of the record count information then one might not see important actual error messages.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
coreutils-7.6-8

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. dd if=/dev/zero count=1 of=/dev/null
2. dd if=/dev/zero count=1 of=/dev/null >/dev/null
3. dd if=/dev/zero count=1 of=/dev/null 2>/dev/null
4. dd if=/dev/zerooooo count=1 of=/dev/null 2>/dev/null
5. dd --quiet if=/dev/zerooooo count=1 of=/dev/null

  
Actual results:
1.
  1+0 records in
  1+0 records out
  512 bytes (512 B) copied, 2.3633e-05 s, 21.7 MB/
2. <ditto>
3.
4.
5. dd: invalid option -- '-' (THIS IS ANOTHER BUG - should be '--quiet')

Expected results:
1.
  1+0 records in
  1+0 records out
  512 bytes (512 B) copied, 2.3633e-05 s, 21.7 MB/
2. <ditto>
3.
4.
5. dd: opening `/dev/zerooooo': No such file or directory

Additional info:
The record count output is relatively pointless, but in any case it would make more sense to only show such information if the user requested it (eg. with -v/--verbose).  I doubt that there are many scripts out there processing stderr to extract record counts, but many people would be used to seeing dd output its mostly useless information. Let's face it, 'cp' doesn't need to give byte count or record count feedback so you can be sure it actually did something.  It simply isn't the normal *nix way of doing things.

Anyhow there currently isn't a sensible way to separate actual error messages from the generally unnecessary record count feedback.  There should be.

After all, somebody once decided to add the '--help' and '--version' options, and the world hasn't collapsed as a result.