How can I move files and view the progress (e.g. with a progress bar)?

There's a new tool called progress that can find any descriptor related to a running command and show progress and speed: available here

progress -w

outputs the stats for all running cp,mv etc. operations

I don't like the idea to overwrite binaries from coreutil when there are simpler solutions, so here are mine:

rsync: Rsync copies files and has a -P switch for a progress bar. So if you have rsync installed, you could use a simple alias in your shells dotfile:

alias cp='rsync -aP'

The downside is, that rsync is a little bit slower than cp, but you should measure this with time and decide for your self, I can live with it :-)

Shell Script: A shell script can also create the progress bar. I found this a while ago on the net and I don't remember the source:

#!/bin/sh
cp_p()
{
   strace -q -ewrite cp -- "${1}" "${2}" 2>&1 \
      | awk '{
        count += $NF
            if (count % 10 == 0) {
               percent = count / total_size * 100
               printf "%3d%% [", percent
               for (i=0;i<=percent;i++)
                  printf "="
               printf ">"
               for (i=percent;i<100;i++)
                  printf " "
               printf "]\r"
            }
         }
         END { print "" }' total_size=$(stat -c '%s' "${1}") count=0
}

This will look like:

% cp_p /home/echox/foo.dat /home/echox/bar.dat
66% [===============================>                      ]

bar:

‘bar’ - ‘cat’ with ASCII progress bar

bar is a small shell script to display a process bar for all kind of operations (cp, tar, etc.). You can find examples on the project homepage.

Its also written for the bourne shell, so it will run nearby everywhere.

You can build a patched cp and mv which then both support the -g switch to show progress. There are instructions and patches at this page. However: The page instructs you to do

$ sudo cp src/cp /usr/bin/cp
$ sudo cp src/mv /usr/bin/mv

which overwrites the original cp and mv. This has two disadvantages: Firstly, if an updated coreutils package arrives at your system, they are overwritten. Secondly, if the patched version has a problem, they might break scripts relying on standard cp and mv. I would rather do something like this:

$ sudo cp src/cp /usr/local/bin/cpg
$ sudo cp src/mv /usr/local/bin/mvg

which copies the files to /usr/local/bin which is intended for user compiled programs and gives them a different name. So when you want a progress bar, you say mvg -g bigfile /mnt/backup and use mv normally.

Also you can do alias mvg="/usr/local/mvg -g" then you only need to say mvg bigfile /mnt/backup and directly get the progress bar.