Suggestion for dd -- Why didn't anyone think of this before.

[drsmith]

I've been using dd for over 10 years now, and in all that time, one
thing has constantly been a major irritation:  the utility has NO
capability to display it's progress.  If I'm copying 120GB of data,
it takes several hours, and I can't predict *when* the copy will be
complete.  It seems really odd to me that in 30 years, no one ever
thought to add the ability to give feedback about it's progress
to the user.  In my opinion, it's been a glaring omission from every
variant of the utility ever released. 

What I'd propose is to simply add a command line option to have it
display a period(or even a running tally) for every x blocks
processed.  I typically know how much data is to be processed and
I also typically know how big my blocks are.  With at least a little
feedback, I could then deduct when it will finish. 

Thanks. 

--drsmith 

"If I wanted to be bored to death with 6000 pages of dreck, I'd read 
War_And_Peace 4 times." - Lewis Black on the Congressional Tax Code.