What does dd stand for?
Though the “best answer” was given, this site states otherwise:
Actually, it stands for ‘Copy and Convert’ and was renamed to
dd
only becausecc
was reserved for the C compiler! This is the authentic information I got from the man pages of our Unix-V7 on our university PDP 11.
Original mail at comp.unix.misc
(usenet): The Unix Acronym List
Wikipedia (dd) asserts it was named after IBM JCL command DD which stands for Data Definition. I always thought it would mean data duplicate, though.
"dump data". JCL is irrelevant.