Copy duration of cp


 
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# 1  
Old 10-07-2011
Copy duration of cp

Hello forum, i would like to ask if there's a way to view the remaining time of copying files (talking about copying gigabytes) while the cp commnad is running.


I'm using OpenBSD 4.9 -stable.

Thanx in advance. Smilie

Last edited by sepuku; 10-07-2011 at 10:09 PM..
# 2  
Old 10-08-2011
Other than watching filesizes change with ls or du -hs /path/to/destination, no.
# 3  
Old 10-09-2011
Hi.

This is a mechanism for showing copy progress. It is a Bourne shell script, intended to be portable: Theiling Online: ASCII bar the author calls it small, the version that I have used is almost 700 lines long.

For a c code, there is pv: ivarch.com: Pipe Viewer along with a note about an OpenBSD port, and an informative blog at A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer - good coders code, great reuse

Best wishes ... cheers, drl

---------- Post updated Oct 9th, 2011 at 06:10 ---------- Previous update was Oct 8th, 2011 at 06:31 ----------

Hi.

In re-visiting the web page for pv, it struck me that I could use it in a current application.

I keep several virtual machines in a large machine -- a "VM server" as it might be called. I often take snapshots with the VMWare server. However, at longer intervals I want to save the state of each VM. For that, the VM is off-powered, and I run a shell script to tar the files that VMWare creates and gzip the resulting tar file. This often takes more than 10 minutes, so I find it useful (and comforting) to see the progress.

The output looks like this after the tar file for distribution GNU/Linux mint has been created and compressed:
Code:
 Working on creating tar-gzip image for vm-mint, 4.63 GB, ( 4976613260 )
      tar: 4.63GB 0:10:49 [7.31MB/s] [======================>] 100%            
     gzip: 1.75GB 0:10:49 [2.76MB/s] [                                     <=>]

the size of the tar file was estimated with du, and 2 instances of pv were used, 1 for the tar, which produces the first progress line. The size of the data for the second process cannot be estimated, so in place of a completion bar, the symbols "<=>" are simply moved back and forth within the brackets to show activity.

The pv code is quite clever, and uses cursor position commands to move back and forth between the 2 one-line displays for updating. The first line includes measures for amount copied, time used, rate of transfer, completion bar, and ETA.

The relevant small bit of script that gets this accomplished is:
Code:
  size=$( du -sb $machine | awk '{print $1}' )
  gbytes=$( echo "scale=2;$size / (1024*1024*1024)" | bc )
  echo " Working on creating tar-gzip image for $machine, $gbytes GB, ( $size )"
  tar cvf - $machine 2>>tar.log |
  pv -cN tar -s "$size" |
  gzip |
  pv -cN gzip > $BASE/${machine}.tar.gz

I'm impressed with the thought that went into the design of pv. In my system, pv was in the repository (Debian).

Good luck ... cheers, drl

Last edited by drl; 10-08-2011 at 08:44 AM..
 
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