Disk images tend to be large yet available disk space remains a scarce resource even in times of multi-terabyte devices. For this reason, it can still be handy to retrieve a disk image from the Internet and write it to a device without having to temporarily store it on your disk.
The below command will retrieve some.iso
by means of wget
and pipe the downloaded data to dd
‘s stdin
. The dd
command will then write everything to the /dev/sdX
device:
wget -q -O - http://example.com/some.iso | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M
Be careful to supply the right output device file. As we all (should) know, any mistake in using dd
can cause you erased devices and sleepless nights.