How many times have you wished there was an easy way to view the progress of a gzip? a grep? redirected file read/writes? file copies? There are many situations where the addition of a simple progress bar would make the user experience 1 million times more bearable. Several years ago I had read about pipe viewer, or pv for short. This is truly the answer to my progress bar prayers. I cannot believe I had forgotten about such a nifty and useful tool. It’s been in existence so long, chances are good that you forgot about it too. I’ll just jump right in…

The project page describes it as…

…a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion.

It’s hard to believe that Andrew Wood first produced this Linux software gem way back in 2002! Its been around so long, I had trouble finding a 64bit version of it…. like it really matters. Anyway, if anyone cares; I rebuilt the .rpm for x86_64 and have it available here.

If you are using Redhat/Fedora/CentOS and the RPMforge repository, you can simply type: yum install pv

Official download mirror

Related Posts: On this day...

• The Taliban is Tweeting - 2011
• "The Hurt Locker" producers about to sue an army of pirates - 2010
• The HAVES versus the HAVE NOTS - 2009
• Beat Caffeine Addiction and Stay Awake with Placebos - 2009
• Business Software Alliance says that adopting copyright treaties doesn't decrease piracy - 2009
• Blind man dragged off plane in Philadelphia and accused of faking - 2009
• Serious flaw in OpenSSL on Debian makes predictable ssh, ssl, etc private keys - 2008