PROGRESS(1)

💖 progress — the Coreutils Progress Viewer, bestie edition 💖

okay so you found your way into the progress(1) manual page and honestly? iconic of you. this is the General Commands Manual entry for progress, aka the tiny little gremlin that watches your cp and tells you how much longer you're gonna be staring at your terminal. let's get into it ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

progress — Coreutils Progress Viewer 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

the vibe check, in code form:

progress [ -qdwmM ] [ -W secs ] [ -c command ] [ -a command ] [ -p pid ]
progress -v | --version
progress -h | --help

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so this manual page is the brief documentation of the progress command. brief but mighty, fr fr.

how do i even describe this tool. it's literally a Tiny, Dirty, C command that goes looking for coreutils basic commands (cp, mv, dd, tar, gzip/gunzip, cat, etc.) that are currently running on your system, and then displays the percentage of copied data. that's it. that's the whole thing. she's small, she's nosy, she's perfect 👑

and now she can also estimate throughput — that's what the -w flag is for. highkey obsessed.

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

one bullet per flag, no skipping, we're thorough girlies:

• -q, --quiet — hides all messages. she goes silent mode, no notes 💀
• -d, --debug — shows all warning/error messages. every little complaint, out loud.
• -w, --wait — estimate I/O throughput and estimated remaining time. heads up: this makes the display slower. worth it tho.
• -W, --wait-delay secs — wait secs seconds for the I/O estimation. ngl this one implies -w, so you don't even need to ask twice.
• -m, --monitor — loop while the monitored processes are still running. she stays until the job is done, loyal queen 🫶
• -M, --monitor-continuously — like monitor but she never stops. basically the same energy as watch progress. main character energy, no off switch.
• -c, --command cmd — monitor only this command name (ex: firefox). and yes, you can use this option multiple times on the command line, stack 'em up 🍓
• -a, --additional-command cmd — add this command to the default list. also usable multiple times on the command line.
• -p, --pid id — monitor only this numeric process ID (ex: `pidof firefox`). yup, multiple times on the command line works here too.
• -i, --ignore-file file — do not report a process for file. ⚠️ important: if the file doesn't exist yet, you must give a full and clean absolute path. also multiple times on the command line, obviously.
• -o, --open-mode {r|w} — report only files opened for read or write by the process. this one's lowkey a lifesaver when you only care about output files (or only the input ones) of a process.
• -v, --version — show program version and exit. bye bestie 👋
• -h, --help — display help message and exit. also bye 👋

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🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

you can give permanent options using the PROGRESS_ARGS environment variable. there's an example down below, don't worry. and the rule is: command line arguments take precedence over environment. so the CLI always wins the argument, periodt.

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💜 EXAMPLES 💜

this is the fun part, get comfy:

Continuously monitor all current and upcoming instances of coreutils commands

watch progress -q

See how your download is progressing

watch progress -wc firefox

Look at your Web server activity

progress -c httpd

Launch and monitor any heavy command using $!

cp bigfile newfile & progress -mp $!

Use environment variable to set permanent (multiple) arguments

export PROGRESS_ARGS='-M --ignore-file ~/.xsession-errors'

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🙈 BUGS 🙈

Please report bugs at: http://github.com/Xfennec/progress/issues

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🌟 HOMEPAGE 🌟

http://github.com/Xfennec/progress

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

This manual page was written by Thomas Zimmermann <bugs@vdm-design.de>, for the openSUSE project (and may be used by others). ty for your service 🫡

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and that's the whole page bestie!! this progress manual is dated January 22, 2016, and it came to you courtesy of the General Commands Manual / PROGRESS(1) source. slay, go monitor something 💖✨🎀