> Because tar operations may be long running, it can be useful to have feedback about progress during the operation.
For those running on a system that has SIGINFO (e.g., BSD, macOS?), hit ^T and you'll get a status report to stderr. ^T should work for various other utilities as well: dd, cp, ftp.
On those systems that do not have SIGINFO (Linux?), but are using bsdtar (libarchive), SIGUSR1 will do the same: