Adding status support to the Solaris dd utility
I really dig Solaris, but it is missing a few basic features I have come to rely on. One of these features is the ability to send the dd utility a signal to get the status of a copy operation. Since Solaris is now opensource (or mostly opensource), I thought I would hack some code together to implement this feature. After a bit of coding (and testing), I requested a sponsor to putback my change into opensolaris. One was assigned, and I sent my changes to him to review. I haven’t heard back from him in the past month or two, so I reckon he’s too busy to help me putback my changes. In case others are interested in this feature, I placed a diff with my changes on my website.
Laen on May 15th, 2007
Another option is to use progress:
http://graflex.org/klotz/software/progress/
It displays a continuous progress bar.
dd if=/dev/hda1 bs=131072b | progress -m 1 | dd bs=131072b of=/dev/hdx2
I wish either Solaris or GNU dd had that built in, rather than having to signal.