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tl;dr: We look at how Zsh and Fish is able to indicate a missing terminating linefeed in program output when the Unix programming model precludes examining the output itself.
tl;dr: dd works for reading and writing disks, but it has no "low level I/O" capabilities that make it more suited for this than any other shell utility. Like cat you should use it where it makes sense, e.g. to take advantage of its wide array of options, rather than try to ensure that all disk related commands begin…
ShellCheck is a static analysis tool that points out common problems and pitfalls in shell scripts.
tl;dr: With the Netpbm file formats, it’s trivial to output pixels using nothing but text based IO