Comments on: Adding a simple progress bar to dd

By: Bud

Bud — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:47:58 +0000

You can also use pv (Pipe Viewer)[1] to do this kind of stuff.

[1] http://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/pv

By: Techie Talks

Techie Talks — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:55:39 +0000

Cool progress bar. It’s so simple and I love the effect its like having linux online.

By: kk

kk — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:23:23 +0000

Just a tip about zeroing drives with dd :
use bs=”buffer size ofthe driver” for the speedy erase.
You can try several dd, letting it go about 2 min then ctrl-c
and compare the output. So:
dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/”sdX” bs=”buffer size of the harddisk”

you can see the buffer size with hdparm -i /dev/”sdX”

sdX here is the drivename you have to substitte can be sda sdb …

BE CAREFUL!!!

By: Hal Pomeranz

Hal Pomeranz — Thu, 21 May 2009 03:35:27 +0000

There’s also dcfldd, which includes progress-bar functionality built-in (albeit a ASCII art progress bar).

It might be interesting running some timing tests to see how much overhead is involved in displaying the progress bar via these various methods as opposed to just doing the dd without any status updates.

By: IQgryn

IQgryn — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:49:37 +0000

From the dd man page:

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

I usually set up a loop to monitor it:
$ while [ -d /proc/ ]; so kill -USR1 ; sleep 15; done

Not as graphical, but it works.