Progress indicator for git clone

Not really. There are various stages to git clone:

1. discover the objects that need to be sent ("Counting objects: nnn")
2. compress and send those objects
3. index the received pack
4. check out received files

Stage 1 involves walking through the commit graph from each branch head finding all the commits and associated objects: since there is no idea beforehand of how many commits there are, the progress of this can't be gauged. Sadly this is often where a lot of the time in a clone operation is taken up.

Stage 2 does have a progress counter, although it counts objects rather than volume (so its rate varies, especially if the repo has large blobs)

Stages 3 and 4 have progress counters, although they are usually much faster than the previous two stages.

You might want to take a look at the folder

$project/.git/objects/pack

While cloning, there should be a file starting with tmp_pack_. It contains the currently downloading git pack.

With this information you might be able to eyeball the duration.

You can do:

   du -s .git

to monitor changes in the size of temporary content to get an idea.

   watch du -s .git

allows you to monitor without having to retype the command. Something like the one-liner below will give periodically you the data accumulation rate in kB per second:

    delay=5; prev=`du -sk .git/ | cut -f 1`; sleep $delay; while true; do  cur=`du -sk  .git/ | cut -f 1`; expr \( $cur - $prev \) / $delay ; prev=$cur; sleep $delay; done

I am currently doing a git clone that has taken a few minutes so far and would be curious to know if it is going to finish soon.

With Git 2.10 (Q3 2016), git clone --progress will be more verbose.

See commit 38e590e by Jeff King (peff)
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano in commit a58a8e3 Aug. 4th 2016)}

clone: use a real progress meter for connectivity check

Because the initial connectivity check for a cloned repository can be slow, 0781aa4 (clone: let the user know when check_everything_connected is run, 2013-05-03) added a "fake" progress meter; we simply say "Checking connectivity" when it starts, and "done" at the end, with nothing between.

Since check_connected() now knows how to do a real progress meter, we can drop our fake one and use that one instead.

As noted by ks1322 in the comments

--progress is enabled by default when you run git clone from a terminal. There is no need to write it explicitly for terminal.