dd by default does not display progress status of its process and this could be frustrating especially when performing large and lengthy operation.

This is the easiest and best approach as it's a built-in function of dd itself. It is however only available on later versions of dd in GNU coreutils and not available on variants such as the one in macOS.

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

progress is an external program and need to be installed if it's not already is in your Linux distribution. It could easily be installed in Ubuntu and Debian via apt.

$ sudo apt install -y progress

progress also supports commands other than dd.

$ progress
No command currently running: cp, mv, dd, tar, cat, rsync, grep, fgrep, egrep, cut, sort, md5sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum, sha512sum, adb, gzip, gunzip, bzip2, bunzip2, xz, unxz, lzma, unlzma, 7z, 7za, zcat, bzcat, lzcat, split, gpg, or wrong permissions.

As noted in the above error, make sure you run progress as the same user as the one running your dd command.

To use it, execute progress -m in another terminal session while dd is running and it will continuously monitor progress status of the dd command. be sure to check out other options for progress via man progress.

dd responds to the USR1 signal by showing current progress of it's command such as the following;

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null
9335813+0 records in
9335812+0 records out
4779935744 bytes (4.8 GB, 4.5 GiB) copied, 8.7188 s, 548 MB/s

To see similar output, run the following command from another terminal to send the USR1 signal to dd.

$ kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd)