Depending on what one is doing, placing pv in between (usually with -s to specify size of data if known in advance) gives a progress bar, with speed and size of data passing through.
Say you have an SQL dump of 1048576 bytes:
cat dump.sql | pv -s 1048576 | mysql somedb
and now you know how far it is instead of just waiting :)
Progress indicators. Typing out a long command only to have it just sit there with no report is frustrating.
Depending on what one is doing, placing
pvin between (usually with -s to specify size of data if known in advance) gives a progress bar, with speed and size of data passing through.Say you have an SQL dump of 1048576 bytes:
cat dump.sql | pv -s 1048576 | mysql somedband now you know how far it is instead of just waiting :)
On BSDs you can do ctrl+T and it prints progress, there were plants to implemented this on Linux, but it didn’t get enough traction.