Re: How to find out how much memory your system using "dd" command...

[Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir@cohens.org.il>]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 01:41:36AM +1100, Frank Charles Gallacher wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> When I was a system administrator, there was a command to find out how
> much real memory was on your system, logged in as root (making sure you
> didn't confuse the input and output!):
> 
> dd if=/dev/mem of=/dev/null bs=1024 conv=noerror
> 
> It would chug away for a minute or two, then give you a number of
> records in and out, this number was how many KB or RAM you had;
> I tried this on debian, now all I get is a string of error messages...
> 
> Is there a better way???

Not sure. But for those of you who want other interesting examples for
using dd, check out 

  http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~lard/fomcol/code/clc1.txt

# this is a line editor using only /bin/sh, /bin/dd and /bin/rm

# /bin/rm is not really required, but it is nice to clean up temporary
# files

And later on:

# arithmetic using dd!

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