View ‘dd’ progress

Jul 16

TomLinux General, Linux System Administration, Useful Utilities No Comments

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.

mogrify – convert the existing image with imagemagick

May 08

TomLinux General, Useful Utilities No Comments

Thanks to Rory McCann for pointing this one out.

It is possible to convert (resize, rotate etc) an image without creating a new file. mogrify takes the same options as convert but operates on the existing image. Both are tools included in imagemagick.

Checkinstall – easy way to build RPM and Deb packages

Apr 23

TomLinux System Administration, Useful Utilities No Comments

Thanks to the kind people in #asterisk (irc.freenode.net) I found: Checkinstall

This is a very quick and easy was to make your own RPM and Deb packages. When compiling your package, instead of running “make install” run: “checkinstall”

To build for most distributions, the configure script should be executed with the following options:
./configure –prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc
so that executables, libraries and configuration files are installed to the expected locations.