Check the progress of 'dd'

Even though I call 'dd' a disk destroyer, I have to use this regularly. Once, I had to copy a whole disk to another disk and was waiting for it to finish. Then, I found 'SIGUSR' signal that could be sent to a process to output some relevant information ('dd' in our case).

While 'dd' is running, open a new terminal. First let's get the PID:

# ps -A|grep dd

Then, do this:

# kill -USR1 <pid>

Now, see the terminal where 'dd' is running. You would get some details about the transfer progress. If you are really impatient, you can run this command every 20 seconds with 'watch':

watch -n 20 kill -USR1 <pid>