Mailing the story:

A year ago, the November 2003 "Power Tools" column (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2003-11/power_01.html) looked into some lesser-known tools for editing text: the line editors ex and ed, and the stream editor sed. This month, let's dig deeper and see some uses for the almost-unknown utility dd -- which has many more uses than just reading data from magnetic tapes (one of its most common uses in years past). On the way, we'll touch upon the better-known editing utilities head and tail, the "octal dump" utility od, the /dev/random device, and more.