progress bar for console utilities

Due to my duty, from time to time I have to copy, archive, unzip and carry out other standard actions with large files. Console utilities, such as cp, tar or cat, do an excellent job of their task, but there is one small problem: suppose you need to archive a 500 MB SQL dump, on average hardware this operation can take 5-10 minutes and at the same time , the standard tar does not display any progress line, i.e. the console hangs, as it were, and only by opening top in the next window can you understand that something is happening. I think it will be much more convenient if a progress bar appears in the console as in the same scp and then the user will be better aware of how long he has to wait until the operation is completed.

Having asked Google, I realized that I was far from the first to be bothered by this problem, and an interesting bash script bar was written by good people . How it works can be seen in the picture:



The script is made in the best traditions of the unix-way: it perfectly does the only task assigned to it - it draws a progress bar, and can also be used in command chains.

The script works on most popular systems, such as Linux, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc. You can download the script and find out the details of its work on the project page: http://www.theiling.de/projects/bar.html