"dd" question

[Andrew]

On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 10:15 -0400, Paul Chvostek wrote:
> On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 05:36:46PM -0500, Andrew wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-05-03 at 14:11 -0600, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote:
> > >  Can I used dd from my freebsd box to  
> > > completely copy the whole disk, partition tables and all, to another  
> > > disk?
> ...
> > have another suggestion. If you think the disk will be ok, use dd to
> > "zero-out" the rest of the drive; i.e.
> ...
> > One of these days, I am going to write a tool to do just this sort of
> > thing, since it seems to be a fairly common practice.
> 
> I believe that tool would be g4u, http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/, along with
> the FAQ at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/#shrinkimg .

You are correct; although g4u is a collection of shell scripts, not an
executable. There is some debate about whether or not it needs to be
anything more than a shell script, but I think it makes sense. 

Right now we are using a re-write of g4u with FreeSBIE to install images
in a lab on campus. It sort of has a GUI; we're using 'cdialog' based
menus. I would like to re-write it in C, and add most of the features
listed at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/#size. I know it would be quite
difficult, but I would like to add filesystem support to this
yet-to-be-written tool as well. And I think it should be multithreaded
too. This list of features seems to make this more of a programming
exercise than question of what's actually necessary to get the job done.
Anyway... When I get around to it...

-Andrew