Re: [dd] show progress?

[Jim Meyering]

"Brett Alton" <address@hidden> wrote:

> I would like to discuss the addition of some sort of progress bar in dd.
>
> When I'm low-level formatting hard drives with:
>
> dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=10M conv=notrunc
>
> It'd be nice to know the progress of the operation. The same goes for
> cloning hard drives.
>
> Is it possible for dd to know the size of the hard drive and calculate
> its progress?

Here's a tip from the documentation.
It provides at least some idea of progress:

    Sending a USR1 signal to a running `dd' process makes it
    print I/O statistics to standard error and then resume copying.

      $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null& pid=$!
      $ kill -USR1 $pid; sleep 1; kill $pid
      18335302+0 records in
      18335302+0 records out
      9387674624 bytes (9.4 GB) copied, 34.6279 seconds, 271 MB/s