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Not necessarily. You can send the CONTinue signal to a process using the kill command. This will not cause the process to terminate.

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Or use "kill -0 <pid>" to check if a signal can be sent/the pid exists.

Or use kill -USR1 <pid> to check the progress of dd

Only if you've enabled it. If you've not, the process will terminate unceremoniously (in a mechanism borne entirely out of hatred for users.)

This is my favourite part of dd: The "will I receive a status report or will I terminate my long-running copy?" gamble.

Is that a BSD thing? I've never had to enable it on Linux to avoid killing the process.

Me neither, on debian.

It's SIGINFO on the BSD's, and works with just about any process (though obviously not everything has a customized handler). Also handily mapped to Ctrl-T.

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