You can also have nice dialogs by using dialog/xdialog/zenity. For example, you can use named pipes and get a nice progress bar:

    mkfifo progress
    cat progress | zenity --progress --text='progress'  --percentage=0 &
    echo 10 > progress
    sleep 10
    echo '# Done!' > progress
    echo 100 > progress

https://help.gnome.org/users/zenity/3.32/progress.html.en

http://linuxcommand.org/lc3_adv_dialog.php