Shell Scripting Hack: cp Command With a Progress bar

by nixCraft on January 24, 2008 · 12 comments· LAST UPDATED January 24, 2008

This is a nice shell scripting hack. It allows you to give a progress bar like wget to cp command.

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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }

1 mastrboy January 24, 2008 at 1:36 pm

great script function, i have tried something like it before called bar: http://www.theiling.de/projects/bar.html

2 vivek January 24, 2008 at 2:02 pm

masterboy,

bar – great find!

3 unixfoo January 24, 2008 at 2:31 pm

This is a good one ..

- http://unixfoo.blogspot.com

4 drivesoslow January 24, 2008 at 4:08 pm

It won’t do anything for me. I try to use it and it just come right back to the prompt.

5 Jerod January 24, 2008 at 5:40 pm

drivesoslow:

same here :(

6 vivek January 24, 2008 at 6:15 pm

drivesoslow / Jerod ,

Open a shell prompt and just paste the code. Type the following (it will not work with wildcards)
cp_p /path/to/big/file.ext /copy/here

7 Jeff Schroeder January 24, 2008 at 7:08 pm

Vivek,

This is cool and all, but the overhead of strace make this not very useful. rsync -av shows a progress bar. You can also get a progress bar if you use scp locally. Yes, scp supports local file transfers without using any network or connecting to a local sshd instance.

jeff@omniscience:~$ du -h windows.tar.bz2
822M windows.tar.bz2
jeff@omniscience:~$ time cp_p windows.tar.bz2{,.new}
99% [====================================================================================================>]
real 2m18.957s
user 0m11.589s
sys 0m23.469s
jeff@omniscience:~$ ls window*
windows.tar.bz2 windows.tar.bz2.new
jeff@omniscience:~$ time cp windows.tar.bz2{,.new2}
real 1m39.597s
user 0m0.096s
sys 0m5.092s

8 Daemones January 25, 2008 at 2:04 am

How i can use this script?

9 Buddy Friend February 1, 2008 at 9:54 pm

LOL at the nubs who can’t get this to work. Go back to your Vista box and stay there.

Only thing I had to do was set my terminal to ANSI. Also, the width of this progress bar is fixed, it will not scale with the width of your terminal.

Also note that for trivial transfers they might complete before the script has a chance to output the progress bar. So if the file copies and you didn’t see a progress bar, it’s because you didn’t need one.

yes scp and rsync are alternatives but this is very cool nonetheless. Thank you for posting it!

10 leebret July 25, 2010 at 8:28 pm