Display transfer speed when performing "cp" from the command line? [duplicate]

Question

Is this possible?

Answer 1

The standard coreutils cp command doesn't support this. There's a Gentoo patch floating around that adds it for different versions, although it's not included in Gentoo anymore for some reason; the version for coreutils 6.10 is in their bugzilla, and I'm sure there are lots of others around.

If you don't want to patch cp, you need to use some other command. For example, rsync has a --progress flag, so you can do:

rsync --progress source destination

If instead of copying you cat the data and then redirect stdout to the destination (i.e. cat source > destination), then you can use a program that measures pipe throughput and insert it in the middle (cat source | SOME-PROGRAM > destination); there are a couple mentioned in this related question. The one I recommended there was pv (Pipe Viewer):

If you give it the --rate flag it will show the transfer rate

Answer 2

I find that using pv in this manner works well for that purpose

pv -p file1 > file2

The -p switch shows the file transfer progress. To see the transfer speed, add the -r switch. If you want to see the average transfer rate over time, you can use the -a switch.

pv -pra file1 > file2

Answer 3

I know this is rather old, but...

If you do not actually want to display the rate, but only want to watch if something is happening on copying of a large file, you can also just use the watch command (also works with mv):

cp /path/to/myfile /path/to/target/myfile

Then, in another shell, or pushing the copy-command to the background (e.g. with Ctrl + Z followed by bg), you can check the result with:

watch "ls -sh1 /path/to/target"

This will continuously update the output of the ls command update (by default every 2.0s), displaying something like:

Every 2.0s: ls -sh1 /path/to/target                                      
Tue Jan 12 15:02:45 2016

total 1.1G
4.0K data
130M tmp1.txt
137M tmp2.txt
151M tmp3.txt
168M tmp4.txt
162M myFile

Answer 4

Hi Another way to show the transfer speed is to use scp on localhost like this:
scp -rv src_folder user@localhost:/dest_folder

Answer 5

Here is a script that uses du to monitor throughput. This is more application agnostic and is also referenced in https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/301490/183269. Execute the script on the destination host.

monitorio () {
# show write speed for file or directory
    interval="10"
    target="$1"
    size=$(du -ks "$target" | awk '{print $1}')
    firstrun="1"
    echo ""
    while [ 1 ]; do
        prevsize=$size
        size=$(du -ks "$target" | awk '{print $1}')
        #size=$(ls -l "$1"  | awk '{print $5/1024}')
        kb=$((${size} - ${prevsize}))
        kbmin=$((${kb}* (60/${interval}) ))
        kbhour=$((${kbmin}*60))
        # exit if this is not first loop & file size has not changed
        if [ $firstrun -ne 1 ] && [ $kb -eq 0 ]; then break; fi
        echo -e "\e[1A $target changed ${kb}KB ${kbmin}KB/min ${kbhour}KB/hour size: ${size}KB"
        firstrun=0
        sleep $interval
    done
}

example use:

user@host:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/zero bs=1 count=50000000 &
user@host:~$ monitorio /tmp/zero
/tmp/zero changed 4KB 24KB/min 1440KB/hour size: 4164KB
/tmp/zero changed 9168KB 55008KB/min 3300480KB/hour size: 13332KB
/tmp/zero changed 9276KB 55656KB/min 3339360KB/hour size: 22608KB
/tmp/zero changed 8856KB 53136KB/min 3188160KB/hour size: 31464KB
^C
user@host:~$ killall dd; rm /tmp/zero