Comments on: dd command “progress bar”

By: blog:run_dd_with_progress_information [Brb wiki]

blog:run_dd_with_progress_information [Brb wiki] — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 06:57:51 +0000

[...] http://www.vioan.ro/wp/2009/03/28/dd-command-progress-bar/ linux, dd, security 1) if you are required by law or are really paranoid, use shred, which [...]

By: Ateeq

Ateeq — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:49:24 +0000

Just don’t try it on Solaris as you’ll kill your dd command.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:55:42 +0000

Really useful tip – many thanks!

I use dd a lot, and it always troubled me that you get *no* indication that it’s even doing anything at all! This has solved that worry

By: Strange

Strange — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:07:02 +0000

If someone is wondering how to do this in BSD here is the code:

dd if=/dev/path of=/dev/path bs=1048576 &
ddpid=$!
while [ -d /proc/$ddpid ]; clear; do kill -INFO $ddpid; sleep 10; done

-INFO is the same that -USR1 but for BSD environments.

Hope this helps someone.

By: kk

kk — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:23:39 +0000

Just a tip about zeroing drives with dd :
use bs=”buffer size ofthe driver” for the speedy erase.
You can try several dd, letting it go about 2 min then ctrl-c
and compare the output. So:
dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/”sdX” bs=”buffer size of the harddisk”

you can see the buffer size with hdparm -i /dev/”sdX”

sdX here is the drivename you have to substitte can be sda sdb …

BE CAREFUL!!!

By: ionut

ionut — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 20:35:31 +0000

@Dan, thanks for your suggestion, but in my post I forgot to add “dd” to killall command, so, the correct command should be: sudo killall -USR1 dd

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:44:27 +0000

It is better to use “sudo pkill -USR1 ^dd$” instead of killall. If you use killall you send the signal to every process running on your system, which can have unpredictable results.