Shell Programming and Scripting

Does anyone know how to get hash marks (or some other visual indicator) to print to the screen during tar or zip commands run from within a Cshell on Sun or Linux? Currently the user receives no indication that a command is running and cannot be sure that a problem has not occurred. I can find nothing in the man pages about how to do this.

Also is there a way from within a Cshell script to determine if the user is running on a Linux or Sun machine?

Thanks,
Paul H.
Denver

For zip, try -v to get a progress indicator. For tar, also try -v, it will print filenames as they are archived.

I am using -v, and the files are echoed to the screen - the problem is that they are extremely large files and the screen can be motionless for hours while the file is zipped/tarred/ftpd. Are there any other solutions?

Thanks,
Paul H.

tar is not an interactive program, it has nothing like that. You might install bar or pv and pipe tar's output through them.