Q:

do some versions of dd not understand multiplicative suffixes?

I was wondering if there are certain versions of dd that don't understand multiplicative suffixes. From the dd man page it says:
bs=BYTES
    read and write BYTES bytes at a time (also see ibs=,obs=) 
BLOCKS and BYTES may be followed by the following multiplicative suffixes: c =1, w =2, b =512, kB =1000, K =1024, MB =1000*1000, M =1024*1024, xM =M GB =1000*1000*1000, G =1024*1024*1024, and so on for T, P, E, Z, Y.

but when I ran dd with a G suffix on the bs parameter I got an error about the number not being understood:
bash $ dd if=/dev/urandom of=largeMovie.avi count=1024 bs=75G
dd: invalid number `75G'

The version of dd is as follows:
bash $ dd --version
dd (coreutils) 5.97

A

A:

I think you're on 32 bit and 75G is bigger than size_t.
Even on 64 bit you'll need at least that amount of mem available as dd will allocate a buffer of the size specified by bs.

