Show HN: Linux tool to show progress for cp, rm, dd, etc.

pv is by no means a standard include. Also the obvious advantage here is being able to monitor progress for processes you didn't pipe to pv initially (e.g., forgot or didn't think it would be a long transfer).

zurn• 12 years ago

pv is just cat with a progress bar, so it only handles the case where you are copying a single big file.

TobbenTM• 12 years ago

Ehm, etc is a directory, not a program?

(Sorry, really bad joke...)

justincormack2• 12 years ago

dd has progress built in, under Linux it is kill -USR1 <pid> to get a progress report, the signal varies by OS. cp has a -v option, if tahts not enough rsync has a --progress option too that gives within file progress.

daw___• 12 years ago

`cv` is a coreutils viewer, rsync is not included in coreutils.

justincormack2• 12 years ago

cv is not included in coreutils either, so I still have to install something.

scarygliders• 12 years ago

And dcfldd (not a coreutils app you have to install it separately) gives you a progress report, as well as using all the usual dd syntax.

midko• 12 years ago

To expand the parent comment, in Terminal (OS X), Ctrl-T prints the progress of dd and cp so you needn't look up their PIDs

skore• 12 years ago

If anybody is using dd to rescue a failing drive, I can very much recommend using the spectactular ddrescue instead.

I had a 2TB drive turn up five figure error rates (Raw Read Error rate ended up at 90k - when I started, it was already no longer possible to mount it, but it did show up in /dev) and thought I had lost an entire year of family pictures (mea culpa on not having a backup, of course). It took four months, 24/7 of meticulous work, but it ended up giving me a near perfect copy to an identical drive (save for ~20kb of truly dead sectors).

Amongst many other features, it has a logfile where it keeps track of the overall process - so that it can be killed or paused and restarted later.

nailer• 12 years ago

Off topic, hoe do I get a PS1 like those screenshots?

Zikes• 12 years ago

Looks just like vim's powerline/airline status bars. IIRC it takes a bit of font wrangling to get those chevron colors working right.

oftenwrong• 12 years ago

https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline

diegolo• 12 years ago

https://github.com/milkbikis/powerline-shell

abcd_f• 12 years ago

Using /proc is pretty damn clever! I thought it would be some sort of wrapper for strace, but your solution is so much simpler.

qwerta• 12 years ago

Very nice idea!

lamby• 12 years ago

My (joke) version:

https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/can-you-get-cp-to-give-a-prog...

jamescun• 12 years ago

For a verbose or simple progress `cp` equivalent I tend to use RSync. Both RedHat/CentOS/etc and Debian/Ubuntu all come with RSync as standard. The only caveat is that I find RSync to be slightly slower than coreutils cp; however you do gain all the advantages of RSync if you then need to sync files across the network for example.

rsync --progress <source> <destination>
rsync --progress /home/me/music/*.mp3 /mnt/shared/music

zidar• 12 years ago

It is slightly slover, but one huge benifit is, that you get -P or --partial, which often ends up saving me lots of time.

thejosh• 12 years ago

I also like -avh and --stats for rsync, I use rsync many times a day for transferring files and folders across networks. It's brilliant.

to3m• 12 years ago

I've found Midnight Commander (https://www.midnight-commander.org/) good if you just need the progress bar. In fact, you get not just one, but TWO - one for the individual file, and one for the transfer as a whole. Perhaps I'm easily pleased, but I find this useful.

(It doesn't do all the rsync fanciness, but if you don't need that and/or you've got some unwieldy subset of files to transfer - a situation the GUI-style approach makes light work of - then it comes in handy.)

adrusi• 12 years ago

Here's a single command which should do the same. It supports cp and dd, but anything else that supports SIGINFO could be added in.

    ps -A | grep -P 'cp|dd' | sed -r 's/^\s*([0-9]+).+$/\1/' | xargs kill -s SIGINFO

ars• 12 years ago

This assumes the command supports SIGINFO, but that's a BSD thing. Linux commands don't support that, so this is not a replacement.

And did you really just reinvent pkill?

microtonal• 12 years ago

Slightly related: what many people don't know is that on OS X and BSDs, commands often react to SIGINFO (Ctrl-t), giving progress information. E.g. from the cp man page:

     If cp receives a SIGINFO (see the status argument for stty(1)) signal,
     the current input and output file and the percentage complete will be
     written to the standard output.

ramidarigaz• 12 years ago

dd has a similar feature, but with SIGUSR (kill -USR1), and it works on Linux too.

ysangkok2• 12 years ago

How do you fire that signal from the console ?

akshatpradhan• 12 years ago

Personally, I think the experience of typing ctrl+t is better than using pkill. Just 2 keyboard taps and you're done.

ak2172• 12 years ago

Very cool. Is there a reason why Linux tools don't react to SIGINFO, other than just "not implemented"?

na85• 12 years ago

As far as I'm aware, Linux tools do react to various signals, just not SIGINFO because it comes from BSD and Linux just doesn't use that particular signal.

You can check dd progress by sending USR1, for example.

ck2• 12 years ago

I really hope this stays on the HN front page for awhile because what a great utility.

I've been using patched copies of coreutils to do the same thing, this is much better.

By the way, if you ever need to quickly spy on rsync you can try this:

       watch lsof -ad3-999 -c rsync

but there is a chance cv will work with rsync too and be more helpful

stanzheng• 12 years ago

Anyone know a similar tool available to OSX or if its feasible to port or recreate this for MAC?

I'm not too familiar with what file libs or utils can be used to handle this as the author says this relies on a linux specific header file and tool.

See https://github.com/Xfennec/cv/issues/6

gaadd332• 12 years ago

Just hit ctrl-t to get status on OS X.

mef2• 12 years ago

ctrl+t doesn't show percent complete

lobster_johnson• 12 years ago

Entirely feasible, as far as I know; OS X lets you discover processes and access their devices. OS X, being BSD-based, doesn't have a /proc file system; instead, you have to use sysctl() to get at the data.

alex_duf• 12 years ago

Sweet ! It's even in the AUR repositories !

jackmaney• 12 years ago

A completely unrelated question: in the terminal screenshots, what is being used for PS1? I love that display of the CWD and git repo on the command line.

madeofpalk• 12 years ago

It's called Powerline, and it has bindings and configs for nearly every shell, editor, and everything in between including tmux.

http://powerline.readthedocs.org/en/latest/overview.html

kator• 12 years ago

In the old days I've done this using lsof -p PID and looking at where the files are in relationship to their size. If you have a long running process lsof can be a wonderful tool to figure out how it's doing.

Show HN: Linux tool to show progress for cp, rm, dd, etc.

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