I’ve been using dd a lot more these days. It seems like I’m blanking a hard drive or making a copy of one everyday now. If you have ever used dd, you know that it does not like to tell you how far along it is in the process of doing its thing. Well I have a solution to fix this!

Open up a new shell be it on the same machine with the old Ctrl + Alt + F# combo, a new ssh section, or a new terminal window. Once in the new shell enter:

watch -n 30 kill -USR1 1234

replacing 1234 with the process id of dd, and then then hit enter. Now every 30 seconds dd will take a dump and tell you whats going on.

To get the process id of your dd command run:

ps ax | grep dd

and there you have it. Now you can see where your dd process is at.