[plug] dd progress bar

[Craig Ringer]

Hi folks

I'm working on an installer for the computer angels distro. It's pretty 
simple - netbooted, auto partitioning, writes images over the network 
with transparent decompression, expands the images to fill the 
partitions, writes an MBR, and reboots.

Everything is now going well, and with a few limitations (ie no SCSI 
support yet) it is fully functional.

However... it really, really needs a progress bar in `dd` so that the 
user can tell how much data has been written to disk. The lack of a 
progress bar makes it feel like it's taking FOREVER, when it's only a 
few minutes. I've found a patch to `dd` to add a progress bar, but it 
was a rather strange one and appeared to be for an old version of `dd`.

So... does anybody know of a progress bar patch I can use for `dd` 
that'll work nicely with the current version? I'm thinking of something 
along the lines of the progress bar `wget` displays when running on a 
terminal.

We all know that a progress bar makes it feel faster - and in this case, 
it helps the tech know when to come back to the machine, too.

I'm using the fileutils `dd`, not the busybox one.

Craig Ringer


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