[pixelbeat]

Yes this is true. Note BSD supports this better with Ctrl-T to generate SIGINFO, which one can send to any command even if not supported, in which case it's ignored. Using kill on linux, and having that kill processes by default is decidedly more awkward.

It's also worth noting the separate "progress" project which can be used to give the progress of running file based utilities.

We generally have pushed back on adding progress to each of the coreutils for these reasons, but the low overhead of implementation and high overlap with existing options was deemed enough to warrant adding this to dd

[gkya]

Also a gotcha on BSD (FBSD at least): SIGUSR1 kills dd.

[stuaxo]

Ctrl-T for SIGINFO is pretty useful, it would be good if Linux could pick this up.

[circuit_breaker]

Been waiting for years, frankly. I guess if I was motivated enough and had the time, I could do the research and submit patches..

[feld]

They don't want it. Even if you got the patches accepted to the kernel they'd never accept patches to GNU Coreutils to support it.

[feld]

The most recent comment I've seen on this is lukewarm at best: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1411.0/03374.html

[floatboth]

> in which case it's ignored

Ignored by the application, sure. But FreeBSD always prints useful stuff like load, current command, its pid and state:

$ dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null

load: 0.72 cmd: dd 5820 [running] 0.70r 0.02u 0.68s 6% 2008k

263276+0 records in

263276+0 records out

134797312 bytes transferred in 0.708372 secs (190291809 bytes/sec)

(here, the "load:..." line is from the system, and the other 3 lines are from dd)