A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer

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February 13, 2009, 20:22

Note that pv is a handy way to add ETA calculations to any task, even ones that don't otherwise involve data flowing through pipes. For exmaple, I wrote a little perl script to fix a database normalization issue, but it was a big database and I needed to know how long it was going to take to finish. Instead of adding a bunch of date/time logic to an otherwise simple script, I just had it print '.' for each row processed, and ran the output through pv -s $(sql 'select count(*) from table') > /dev/null

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