How to monitor progress of dd command

dd is normally normally used to copy or write into block devices or any other large file operations where it could take a while to complete. It by default does not display progress status of its operation and this could sometimes be stressful.

There are a few methods that you can use to to display and monitor progress of dd command from the terminal.

1. Run dd with status=progress argument.

   $ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null status=progress
   2755155968 bytes (2.8 GB, 2.6 GiB) copied, 5 s, 551 MB/s

   This method is only available in newer versions of dd in GNU coreutils and not available on variants such as the one in macOS.

2. Send USR1 signal to running dd process.

   $ kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd)

   dd responds to the signal by displaying the current status of its running operation.

3. Use progress tool to display progress of dd and other tools' operation such as cp, tar and other common GNU utilities.

   $ sudo apt install --assume-yes progress # Debian and Ubuntu
   $ progress -m