Watch the progress of 'dd'

pkill -USR1 ^dd$

The 'dd' command doesn't provide a progress when writing data. So, sending the "USR1" signal to the process will spit out its progress as it writes data. This command is superior to others on the site, as it doesn't require you to previously know the PID of the dd command.

Sample Output

1192775+0 records in
1192774+0 records out
1221400576 bytes (1.2 GB) copied, 407.301 seconds, 3.0 MB/s

By: atoponce

2010-05-14 16:25:01

dd kill pkill

2 Alternatives + Submit Alt

Watch the progress of 'dd'

need pv (pipe view) : http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
1.25GO 0:00:03 [ 434MO/s] [  <=>                                                      ]
```
9

dd if=/dev/zero | pv | dd of=/dev/null

richard · 2010-05-14 16:58:42 7
Watch the progress of 'dd'

dcfldd is a forensic version of dd that shows a process indicator by default.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1

dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null

twjolson · 2010-05-14 17:37:03 7

What Others Think

You say its superior but you might not realize that if you're running this as root and there are other users on the system also running dd (I'll admit its not likely), then you're also going to make their dd processes print out their status, which they might not want. The truly superior thing would be if there was a key sequence similar to Ctrl-C that would send a USR1 to the process in the fg.

deltaray · 779 weeks and 2 days ago

true, but what's the likelihood of that happening? really? the only time you use 'dd' is for administrative purposes, like creating swap files, or overwriting data. any other use of dd means you're likely using the wrong utility. :)

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yeneba6574 · 45 weeks and 6 days ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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