Status messages for dd

Copying data with dd can take a very long time and the process could seem to be frozen. To see status messages from dd you can use the following command:

pkill -USR1 -n -x dd

This will output something like below in the original terminal where dd is running:

559+0 records in
559+0 records out
2344615936 bytes (2,3GB) copied, 150,144 s, 15,6 MB/s

To see status updates repeatedly watch is very handy:

watch -n 10 "pkill -USR1 -n -x dd"

This outputs a status message like above all 10 seconds.

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