I want to make a USB bootable by cloning an image. I did some research and I haven't found a satisfactory way of making dd provide some feedback back to the console of how the progress is going.
Is there a way, built into the command to do this, aside from polling the PID via the ps command?
If you read man dd, it refers you to info coreutils 'dd invocation' which says, in part,
Sending an INFO signal to a running dd process makes it print
I/O statistics to standard error and then resume copying. In the
example below, dd is run in the background to copy 10 million blocks.
The kill command makes it output intermediate I/O statistics, and
when dd completes normally or is killed by the SIGINT signal, it
outputs the final statistics.
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null count=10MB & pid=$!
$ kill -s INFO $pid; wait $pid
3385223+0 records in
3385223+0 records out
1733234176 bytes (1.7 GB) copied, 6.42173 seconds, 270 MB/s
10000000+0 records in
10000000+0 records out
5120000000 bytes (5.1 GB) copied, 18.913 seconds, 271 MB/s
On systems lacking the INFO signal dd responds to the USR1
signal instead, unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is
set.
You can also try the status=progress option, which will display the info in real time:
[~]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null count=10MB status=progress
4708234752 bytes (4.7 GB, 4.4 GiB) copied, 4 s, 1.2 GB/s
10000000+0 records in
10000000+0 records out
5120000000 bytes (5.1 GB, 4.8 GiB) copied, 4.3516 s, 1.2 GB/s
[~]$
