Pipe viewer

I’ve been moving many terabytes of data between servers this week, and have been using a lot of piped tar commands to help out. Now it’s often useful to have a progress indicator when dong any sort of lengthy operation, and a few minutes on Google led me to a fantastic little tool: pv (pipe viewer). It does exactly what it says on the tin; you just add it your pipeline (e.g. tar -C /src/ cf – * | pv | tar -C /dst/ xf -) and you have an instant progress indicator.