In the cases where you need root it's often even easier to use the 'tee' command instead of spawning another shell; esp. if the command has symbols which need to be escaped.
Just like in household plumbing, the 'tee' command basically takes the input and sends it to more than one place. Naturally, running 'sudo tee' will let you send things all over but as another user.
All that said, I won't speak to the comment "why does the entire internet say to use dd". I've never actually found the "whole internet" to agree on much of anything (-:
Your example would then become something like...
cat whatever.img | sudo tee /dev/whatever > /dev/null # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/82256
Just like in household plumbing, the 'tee' command basically takes the input and sends it to more than one place. Naturally, running 'sudo tee' will let you send things all over but as another user.
All that said, I won't speak to the comment "why does the entire internet say to use dd". I've never actually found the "whole internet" to agree on much of anything (-: