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That's more awkward and outputs a separate line per interrupt. Also to do that programmatically (to provide progress to a program using dd underneath) is tricky to do robustly due to the default disposition of SIGUSR1. SIGUSR1 is really only a hack provided on systems that don't support SIGINFO (which is easier to generate and whose default disposition is easier to handle robustly)

You could but letting dd take care of it instead of doing it yourself is much better IMHO.

What if you started dd without status=progress ?

Then that's your own fault?

But surely if you could send a SIGUSR1 and get the progress it would be useful. I won't always have the foresight to put the progress argument. Maybe I expected the task to be quick but it's not.

Updating dd to continuously dump text to the screen by default would probably break a lot of existing scripts.

Just on SIGUSR1 would be good enough to get an idea where dd is at. And it would be on stderr, not stdout.

> it would be on stderr, not stdout

Oh, that's true.

Anyway, what behavior do you want to see exactly? You can still send the USR1 signal and get the update behavior just like before. Were you just pointing out that there are cases where you still need to use that feature, or something else?

If you're on BSD, that'll kill dd.