View ‘dd’ progress

Jul 16

adminLinux General, Linux System Administration, Useful Utilities Comments Off

When reading/writing a disk image using Linux tool ‘dd’ launch as follows:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=filename.img & pid=$!
this will run ‘dd’ in the background.

To see the progress:
kill -USR1 $pid

Notes:

  1. If you are doing it as a non-root user you’ll need to prefix those commands with sudo
  2. If you do that do ‘sudo ls’ first, otherwise the ‘sudo dd’ will fail waiting on the password which it’ll never get as its backgrounded.

Thanks to Cian.

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