Full TIL Post

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!