dd(1) question

[John R. MacMillan]

When I was trying to get the PD tar(1) running on my UNIXpc, I
couldn't get the "compress-on-the-fly" to the floppy to work
correctyly.  Dd gets a write error, and exits non-zero, etc.

Even just trying (with a formatted floppy in, and the door closed):

$ echo 'Why does this fail?' | dd of=/dev/rfp021
dd write error: Error 0
0+1 records in
0+1 records out
$ 

The weirdest part is that everything seems to work.  And if "Error 0"
means what I think it does, it means errno was 0 when dd(1) failed.

I even checked ccpio(1) (posted a while ago) and it gets the same
error but redirects it to /dev/null.

So is it me, or my machine, or is there something wrong with dd(1)?
--
John R. MacMillan
jrmacmillan at lily.waterloo.edu		If the universe fits, wear it.
..!watmath!lily!jrmacmillan