Live stats for dd ... everything is possible!

Good Afternoon!! … or morning … depends where you are :P

Well, in computing world, it’s always shiny, happy, warm!! So, we don’t care of the time ^^
But sometimes, we do care … especially when you ran a dd of Gigabytes of data that is running forever!!

I’ll show you how to get stats even when the command is still running ..

You, user of dd should certainly know that when this command ends, it gives you some stats output like:

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15634841+0 records in
15634841+0 records out
8005038592 bytes (8.0 GB) copied, 583.169 s, 13.7 MB/s

But the manpage of dd states it very clearly. You can get live stats of dd sending him a signal: SIGUSR1.

What you have to do is to open another terminal, get the PID of the running command, then use:

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~# kill -USR1 <PID of dd>

On the terminal on which your dd is running, you should get the stats output without stopping the process.

Hype!