[rsync]

"Yes "D" is not for disk/drive/device/..."

But that's the very beauty of unix!

If you can find a way to use 'dd' for disk/drive/device you can use it in interesting new manners (pipelines, etc.) and have very good confidence that it won't break in weird ways. It will do the small, simple thing it is supposed to do even if you are abusing it horribly.

Like this, for instance:

  pg_dump -U postgres db | ssh [e-mail] "dd of=db_dump"

[takeda]

Is there a benefit to use dd over cat in this case?

[circuit_breaker]

You could use it to rate limit... or arbitrarily set block sizes per use case. I've used it for the former when doing 'over the wire' backups through ssh