[Wolves] dd usage?

[Andy Smith]

Hello,

On Wed, Jun 04, 2014 at 10:38:01PM +0100, Chris Ellis wrote:
> Another trick to know when using dd, is that you can send the USR1 signal
> to it to show the progress, by default dd will print nothing until it
> completes, in another terminal you can execute:
> 
> pkill --signal USR1 ^dd
> 
> This will make dd display its progress (to the terminal dd is running in).

For tasks like this I like using "pv" instead of "dd", as it
presents a nifty little progress bar that says how fast it's going
and when you can expect it to complete. e.g.

# pv -s 60g < /dev/sda > /dev/sdb

(you can specify buffer size with -B, but I never do because the
default is something a lot saner than 1 byte!)

As it's a clean filter of stdin/out it's a neat drop-in replacement
for things like "dd" or "cp" in a lot of cases.

"dd" is of course present everywhere and has many more obscure swiss
army knife options… :)

Cheers,
Andy

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