`pv` (pipeviewer) is usually very useful for tracking progress.
dd if=/dev/zero count=10 bs=1M | pv > file.bin
The other way to see progress on `dd` is to issue a signal 3 (USR1, iirc) to the dd process. kill -3 <dd pid>
dd if=/dev/zero count=10 bs=1M | pv > file.bin
The other way to see progress on `dd` is to issue a signal 3 (USR1, iirc) to the dd process. kill -3 <dd pid>
Be careful with this on some distributions and compilations of DD. Purely anecdotal evidence, but in college I had a friend imaging a very large (5400RPM) drive and about 10 hours into the process he lamented that he wished he could see how far along it was.
I popped open a terminal, ps -A |grep dd, kill -USR1 $PID, and it just exited.
He was rather pissed that I lost him 10 hours.