I was just curious if there is a way to display a text mode progress bar or percent counter when using cp or another file copy utility so you can see how much of the file has been copied and how much remains. I'm just copying files around the same system. Tried scp and while it copied the file, it didn't display a progress meter. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Brad

Use scp instead, it'll do what you want.

It can also be used for copying files from remote machines that you have ssh access to.

And for ftp use sftp or lftp (lftp has filename completion and recursive getting as well - can't remember about sftp).

Gah, I really should finish reading your message before I respond to it, sorry!

You could scp user@localhost:filename filename instead, that'll make it show the progress if you add an ssh-key with no passphrase to your .ssh/authorized_keys it won't hassle you about passwords either. Bit of a cheat though.

Not sure why this is happening. ssh is running:
ps -ef | grep -i ssh
root 1348 1 0 07:48 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/sshd -o PidFile /var/run/sshd.init.pid
root 3906 3868 0 08:06 pts/1 00:00:00 grep -i ssh
linux:~ # exit
logout
bmcneely@linux:~/data/quicken> scp bmcneely@localhost:/home/bmcneely/data/quicken/quick.tar.gz bmcneely@localhost:/tmp/quick.tar.gz
bmcneely@localhost's password:
unable to open display
3948: Permission denied, please try again.
3948: Permission denied, please try again.
3948: Permission denied (publickey,password).
lost connection



Any thoughts?

OK, I got it to work with this command
scp quick.tar.gz bmcneely@localhost:/tmp/quick.tar.gz
but it still prompts for my password. Here's my ~/.ssh.authorized_keys file
cat authorized_keys
localhost


Thanks,
Brad

Wait, I found a site that showed how to set it up:
cd ~/.ssh
ssh-keygen -t dsa
cat id_dsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys


Thanks for the help. Regards,
Brad

One last piece to the puzzle, when I run this from a shell script it doesn't show the progress bar. Here's the script:
cat qback
echo Removing old files
rm Q* quick.tar.gz > /dev/null
echo Copying original files for archiving
cp ~/win/data/quicken/Q* . > /dev/null
echo Creating tar file
tar cvf quick.tar Q* > /dev/null
echo Zipping tar file
gzip -9 quick.tar > /dev/null
echo Mounting floppy disk
mount /media/floppy > /dev/null
echo Copying tar file to floppy disk
scp quick.tar.gz bmcneely@localhost:/media/floppy > /dev/null
echo Unmounting floppy disk
umount /media/floppy > /dev/null
echo Backup complete. Remove floppy disk from drive.

I also changed the scp line to read as follow:
scp quick.tar.gz bmcneely@localhost:/media/floppy/quick.tar.gz > /dev/null

Good work on figuring out the ssh key stuff

Remove the redirection of stdout to /dev/null (> /dev/null), this is what's hiding the progress, because you're piping it to /dev/null instead of displaying it on screen.

Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. I completely spaced on the output rediection. Thanks for catching that for me. I followed the steps above that I found on the website and that helped me setup the ssh key. Thanks very much.

np

rsync

rsync -rv <src> <dst> --progress
r = recursive
v = verbose

You can try pv. A tutorial on its usage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTwBlPqRZO8