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Are there any alternatives to pv?

I'd like to see the current transfer rate of a data pipe, a progress bar and an estimated completion time. Any other tools that can do that?

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Did you get any problem with pv? – quanta Aug 21 '12 at 20:44
@quanta No, just curious what I might be missing. :) – Alexander Konovalenko Aug 22 '12 at 5:25
@AlexanderKonovalenko If it ain't broke why reinvent the wheel? – voretaq7♦ Nov 11 '12 at 0:50
Upvoted because I was just on a system that didn't have pv installed and I thought "oh, maybe that other one is there" and then totally blanked on what it was called. – Samuel Edwin Ward Jan 13 at 3:58

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

There is another program called bar that also provides this functionality.

Bar is a simple tool to copy a stream of data and print a display for the user on stderr showing (a) the amount of data passed, (b) the throughput of the data transfer, and (c) the transfer time, or, if the total size of the data stream is known, the estimated time remaining, what percentage of the data transfer has been completed, and a progress bar.

Of course, pv can do what you're asking for with -r -p -e (you may have missed the -s option?) and I never felt a good reason to use bar over pv.

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Thanks! My pv (version 1.1.4) shows everything by default, and I do use -s when necessary. Just being curious whether there are any interesting alternatives. So far, pv users outnumber bar users according to Debian popularity contest. – Alexander Konovalenko Aug 22 '12 at 5:32
up vote 1 down vote

If you are using Debian or Ubuntu, try the package "vbuf". It's not a progress BAR, since that would need to know what 100% means. But it does show bytes, recent rate, and total rate. You just insert the vbuf command in the middle of your pipeline.

Disclaimer: I am the author of vbuf and libvrb.

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