co-authored with Grig Gheorghiu

Background

The dd command is one of those ancient UNIX tools that is extremely powerful, yet at the same time, the syntax can make it feel slightly archaic. A lot of seasoned sysadmins and developers still remember the first time they saw the dd command used by a bearded wizard. He might have used it to test the disk I/O, capture a disk image, or restore it.

In some ways, dd can seem like Old Spice-only the guys over 60 use it. But the younger generation should know that dd still has some tricks up its sleeve. In this article, we're going to put a new twist on this old favorite and show how grandpappy really does know best sometimes. The new twist is to mix dd with Python and the Google Chart API to make a UNIX 2.0 mashup tool. ("UNIX 2.0″ is a play on words for what happens when you change the original behavior of a tool like dd to make it do something a bit different.)

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