How to monitor the progress of the dd command

The dd command is commonly used for copying or writing data to block devices, and it can take some time to complete. However, dd does not show the progress status by default, which can be frustrating.

Fortunately, there are several ways to monitor the progress of the dd command from the terminal.

1. Execute dd with the status=progress argument for real-time updates.

   $ 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 a USR1 signal to the active dd process to display progress.

   $ kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd)

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

3. Utilize the progress tool to monitor the progress of dd as well as other operations for tools like cp, tar, and various GNU utilities.

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