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Stuff... And Things...
Personal blog · stuff-things.netprogrammingsystems
Stuff... And Things... is a personal blog at stuff-things.net about programming and systems. Since 2014, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times, most often “That dd trick and the ballad of SIGINFO (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link these posts for Unix command-line details, such as how dd(1) reports progress via SIGINFO on BSD/macOS versus SIGUSR1 on Linux. The commenters cite them as references rather than praising the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I do... stuff and build... things...
Most-linked posts?
- That dd trick and the ballad of SIGINFO (2016)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-09-20
What Hacker News says?
Even if you don't pass this argument, you can poke most implementations of dd(1) with a certain POSIX signal, and they'll respond by printing a progress line. On Linux, this is SIGUSR1, and you have to use kill(1) to send it. On BSDs (incl. macOS), though, the signal dd listens for is instead called SIGINFO (which probably makes this make a lot more sense for why a process would have this response to it.) Shells/ter…
Comment linking /2016/04/06/that-one-stupid-dd-trick-and-the-ballad-of-siginfo/
on “Hidden gems of moreutils”Submitted FUSE and SSHFS on OS X as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttps://stuff-things.net/2016/04/06/that-one-stupid-dd-trick...
Comment linking /2016/04/06/that-one-stupid-dd-trick-and-the-ballad-of-siginfo/
on “What is fsck up to now?”Submitted Using Solid Queue in Development with Docker and on Heroku as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted That dd trick and the ballad of SIGINFO (2016) as a story · 3 points
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HN discussionSubmitted Taking the Pain Out of PHP Development with Docker Compose as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted That One Stupid Dd Trick and the Ballad of SIGINFO as a story · 1 points
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HN discussion