[animal-hash]

There's also dd status

       status=LEVEL
              The LEVEL of information to print to stderr; 'none'
              suppresses everything but error messages, 'noxfer'
              suppresses the final transfer statistics, 'progress' shows
              periodic transfer statistics

and pv

    pv - monitor the progress of data through a pipe

So with pv, you can do something like

    dd if=/dev/zero count=2 bs=512 | pv | dd of=/dev/null

to visualize your dd progress.

[Ballas]

I am aware of both of those, but in my case I prefer ddrescue for the syntax. For backup scripts I use dd and pv (and pigz).

I recall I started using ddrescue because one of my distros would not autocomplete with the if= prefix, but I can't seem to replicate it currently - so it's probably been fixed (or my memory is failing me).