Pipeviewer

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”.

Example session

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

Fredrik Steen

Former Operations Manager at Redpill Linpro

Time-tracking systems - Timewarrior and ActivityWatch

This is my concluding post in a series of three posts.

  • The first blog post contains my general thoughts on time tracking.
  • The second blog post compares different time-tracking software.
  • When writing this last blog post I’ve been using Timewarrior together with ActivityWatch, Waybar and some home-brewed scripts to track my time as good as I could for a couple of months.

Executive summary

In this blog post I’ll give ... [continue reading]

Time tracking systems - software

Published on May 22, 2025

Time tracking systems - general thoughts

Published on May 13, 2025