Comments on: pv (Pipe Viewer) - Shell pipeline element to meter data passing through

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:58:20 +0000

I recommend to use the ‘rsync’ program together with the ‘--progress’ (or ‘-P’) option if you want a progress bar while copying files.
This works with both local and network copy processes (like ’scp’ or ‘rcp’).

I just recently configured the following aliases for my bash shell (located in my $HOME/.bashrc):

alias rscp=’rsync -aP --no-whole-file --inplace’
alias rsmv=’rscp --remove-source-files’

Where ‘rscp’ means ‘cp’ with ‘rsync’. The ‘-a’ (archive) option ensures that all file properties (date, permissions, owner, etc.) are copied, too. ‘-P’ enables the progress bar. The next two options are a matter of taste but are usefull if you copy files to a USB stick: ‘--inplace’ disables the usage of a hidden file for the partial data during the copy process. ‘--no-whole-file’ re-enables the synchronisation modus, i.e. in this case: a previous partially copied file is continued instead of overwritten.

THe ‘rsmv’ is the move version of ‘rscp’ and simply adds ‘--remove-source-files’ to delete the original files after the copy process.

By: santa

santa — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 07:37:54 +0000

Hm - of course it is not that elegant, but to simulate cp syntax one may use:

#!/bin/bash
if [ -d $2 ]; then
pv $1 > $2/$1
else
pv $1 > $2
fi

By: aftertaf

aftertaf — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 05:14:11 +0000

Isaac:
Simple, beautiful, elegant.
It works and that’s very very good

Thanks so much

By: Isaac

Isaac — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:50:38 +0000

There’s probably a better way to use pv to copy files, I’ve used the following when I wanted to monitor copy progress:

pv big_file.tgz > /some_dir/sub_dir/big_file.tgz

The only real annoyance doing it that way is having to specify the desitnation file name (whereas you would normally just specify the destination dir when using cp)

By: Albert

Albert — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:36:50 +0000

I’m wondering about ‘pv’ and ‘cp’ too!

By: aftertaf

aftertaf — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:39:44 +0000

Hi…

I’m a half-n00b, half-bash user . . . .

Can I use pv to display progress in a cp command?
I cant figure out how and what to pipe exactly….