Using Pipe Viewer for an Easy CLI Progress Bar

If you have a large database file to import or any other longer running process that involves piping data from one place to another then this little utility should definitely be in your arsenal.

Simply enough you use this to give you a progress indication when you are piping large amounts of data.

To use this on a mysql import (which is where I am most likely to use this) you would do the following:

pv ./dumpfile.sql | mysql -u$USER -p$PASS dbname

This will then give you a simple progress bar and very usefully, an ETA that indicates how much time is left For example:

 308MB 0:07:57 [ 216kB/s] [===============>                                          ] 10% ETA 1:08:32

To install the utility you should first of all just try yum install pv. If that doesn’t work then you can read more about installing for your distribution here: http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml