Monitor the progress of dd with Pipe Viewer
11 Aug 2017 ·
Tips & Tricks

As a Raspberry Pi fan, I find myself quite often burning different images on multiple microSD cards to try new distros. This can be annoying due to the lack of feedback during the process. That's the reason why I started to search a solution, and I found Pipe viewer.
Pipe viewer is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. If you're on macOS, you can install it throught brew
:
brew install pv
Let's see the example of burning an image on a microSD. Once you have your card inside your computer, and the image downloaded, execute:
dd if=/path/to/2017-04-10-raspbian-jessie.img | pv | dd of=/dev/your_disk
and instead of not getting any feedback until the end, you'll see something like this in your terminal telling you the status of the process:
87.3MiB 0:07:24 [ 178KiB/s] [ <=> ]
There you have it!
About The Author
Iván González - Software Developer
Hi, my name is Iván (aka dreamingechoes). I'm a passionate software developer from the north of Spain, interested in all kind of technologies.