Show the status of a running dd copy

Updated . Posted . Visible to the public.

When you do a bitwise copy using the dd tool you will not see any output until it completes or an error occurs.
However, you can send a command signal to the process to have it show its progress so far.

From another terminal, simply call (be root or use sudo):

pkill -USR1 dd

This makes dd write something like this into the terminal it is running in:

388+0 records in
387+0 records out
396288000 bytes (396 MB) copied, 24.9862s, 15.9 MB/s

You may also pass the status=progress option to dd like so:

dd if=... of=... status=progress
Arne Hartherz
Last edit
Arne Hartherz
Keywords
linux, unix
License
Source code in this card is licensed under the MIT License.
Posted by Arne Hartherz to makandra dev (2011-07-15 10:00)