Comment 2 for bug 591969

You're on 32bit, on 64bit this seems to work. My guess is that there is a limit to the block size available on 32bit (if that limit was 2G or just under it wouldn't surprise me), on 64bit there is a similar limit somewhere :

dg@major:~$ true | dd bs=3G count=1
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 2.1008e-05 s, 0.0 kB/s
dg@major:~$ true | dd bs=3E count=1
dd: memory exhausted
dg@major:~$ true | dd bs=3Z count=1
dd: invalid number `3Z'

I can see an argument that there might want to put a better error message in, or state that the bs is dependent on memory
size.

Dave