A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer

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Jonathan Wright Permalink
February 03, 2009, 12:57

I found pv a while back, the problem was, I kept forgetting to include it in the original slow command. After the gzip, disk image or what ever had been running for a while, I wanted a progress bar, but not to have to restart the operation.

A handy little function to solve this problem is:

rate () {
tailf $1 | pv > /dev/null
}

It tails the end of a file through pv. It won't give "how long to go" information, but it will show the throughput, and that can often be enough to figure out how long the operation will take.

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