sontek ( John M. Anderson )

Today I found a very informative post on how to get a progress bar with the cp command in Linux.

You can find that blog post here. But I’ll repost the information here in case his blog ever disappears.

With the following bash script:



#!/bin/sh
cp_p()
{
   set -e
   strace -q -ewrite cp -- "${1}" "${2}" 2>&1 \
      | awk '{
	    count += $NF
            if (count % 10 == 0) {
               percent = count / total_size * 100
               printf "%3d%% [", percent
               for (i=0;i<=percent;i++)
                  printf "="
               printf ">"
               for (i=percent;i<100;i++)
                  printf " "
               printf "]\r"
            }
         }
         END { print "" }' total_size=$(stat -c '%s' "${1}") count=0
}



You will get a progress bar like this:


% cp_p /mnt/raid/pub/iso/debian/debian-2.2r4potato-i386-netinst.iso /dev/null
76% [===========================================> ]