On: dd – Destroyer of Disks (2008)

[itchyouch]

`pv` (pipeviewer) is usually very useful for tracking progress.

dd if=/dev/zero count=10 bs=1M | pv > file.bin

The other way to see progress on `dd` is to issue a signal 3 (USR1, iirc) to the dd process. kill -3 <dd pid>

[malcolmputer → itchyouch]

> The other way to see progress on `dd` is to issue a signal 3 (USR1, iirc) to the dd process. kill -3 <dd pid>

Be careful with this on some distributions and compilations of DD. Purely anecdotal evidence, but in college I had a friend imaging a very large (5400RPM) drive and about 10 hours into the process he lamented that he wished he could see how far along it was.

I popped open a terminal, ps -A |grep dd, kill -USR1 $PID, and it just exited.

He was rather pissed that I lost him 10 hours.

[jeffcox → itchyouch]

The aptly named "Progress" also works on dd.

https://github.com/Xfennec/progress