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As a heads up, like the commenter on your blog mentioned, you can write to `/dev/rdisk?` to speed up your transfer. You can also view dd's progress by using pv (available in Homebrew) like: `pv /path/to/image.iso | sudo dd of=/dev/rdisk? bs=?M`

That aside, interesting article. All these new ultra-cheap computers are exciting.

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You can also run dd with `status=progress`, at least on recent versions.

And you can also kill -USR1 $(pidof dd) to get the current progress and transfer rate.

With OS X dd, you can also send it Ctrl-t and get a progress report to stdout.

What does the `?` mean?

I'm not the parent commenter and I'm not on a Mac, but I assume it's the bash glob for a single character match (much like * matches multiple characters, ? matches a single character). Which means the actual file path should be something like `/dev/rdisk0`.

Edit: oh, I guess you meant the ? in `bs=?M`, in which case I don't know. Probably damurdock's way of not committing to a particular value in their post.

Actually you answered it correctly the first time; I've never used `?` globbing before. TIL!

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