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Maxim Radugin
Maxim Radugin

Posted on • Originally published at radugin.com

Monitor Progress of Data Transfer in Console

#linux #terminal #monitoring

Linux and UNIX-based OS'es provide at least two handy command-line tools to monitor data transfer progress: bar and pv.

Both display a one-line progress bar with speed, elapsed or estimated time, and provide customizable formatting.

Examples with bar:

If data size is unknown:

dd if=/dev/zero | bar | dd of=/dev/null
   2.3GB at  581.8MB/s  elapsed:   0:00:04
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If data size is known:

dd if=/dev/zero iflag=count_bytes count=10G | bar --size 10G | dd of=/dev/null
   1.2GB at  592.8MB/s  eta:   0:00:15   11% [=====                               ]
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Examples with pv:

dd if=/dev/zero iflag=count_bytes count=10G | pv | dd of=/dev/null
2.59GiB 0:00:06 [ 397MiB/s] [      <=>                                            ]
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dd if=/dev/zero iflag=count_bytes count=10G | pv --size=10G | dd of=/dev/null
2.59GiB 0:00:06 [ 467MiB/s] [========>                            ] 25% ETA 0:00:17
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pv can also count lines instead of bytes, useful for monitoring log or message rates:

sudo dmesg -w | pv --line --rate > /dev/null
[ 496k/s]
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On a side note, dd can also report progress at runtime, when status=progress is specified.

dd if=/dev/zero iflag=count_bytes count=10G of=/dev/null status=progress
2791971840 bytes (2.8 GB, 2.6 GiB) copied, 3 s, 931 MB/s
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