deadbaed
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dd status

Posted on

Here's a cool tip if you use dd to copy disk images to a disk, or if you want to clone drives.

As we all know (or should know), dd is a powerful tool; but it can be dangerous if not manipulated correctly.

By default, dd doesn't give any information on what is it doing; which can be very boring, because you don't know when you'll be able to test that new Linux distro you just discovered!

Well, good news! You can get some status from dd! This tip works on Linux and OS X.

Linux

When you enter your dd command, add this little snippet at the end:

status=progress

When dd will be busy doing its thing, you should get some info about its progress.

OS X

Run your dd command normally without status=progress, after that open a new terminal and enter this command:

while pgrep ^dd; do sudo pkill -INFO dd; sleep 30; done;

And come back into the dd command. When the dd task will be done, the second command we ran will exit as well and you can close that other terminal safely.

30 is the number of seconds that will update the counter every X seconds.