This post appeared originally in our sysadvent series and has been moved here following the discontinuation of the sysadvent microsite
pv is a nice little tool that will take stdin and make a nice little
progress bar and displaying time elapsed, percentage completed (if size is known)
current throughput rate and the total data transferred and with an ETA.
So if you have a tool that can output it’s result on standard output or read from standard input, one can get a progress bar!
It’s nice to know that “data is flowing”.
Other examples
Send file with Netcat and get a nice progress-bar:
pv file | nc -w 1 example.com 3000
Get progress bar on tar output:
tar zcf - /directory | pv > backup.tar.gz
MySQL dump/restore:
mysqldump database | pv > database.sql
pv database.sql | mysql database
Limit the transfer rate and size of data over a pipe
cat /dev/zero | pv -L 3m -Ss 100m > /dev/null
From a Luddite to a Vibe-Coder
For those who are unfamiliar with the word “luddite”, it was an organized movement of unemployed textile workers being against progress and sabotaging equipment like the power loom in the post banner. We don’t do sabotage, but we’re also not unemployed … yet! On the other hand, many of us seem to be struck by the Ostrich effect.
The modern luddite attitude to AI
It proved difficult to find an image of an ostrich with the head ... [continue reading]