Hi, need some help with an test argument in while

I need to run some things while dd is working

while [ while programm (dd) runs ] ; do ...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
How do I do this ?


By the way does anyone now how to get a progress bar on dd ?

you can try...

I dont seem to get it, how shall that work ?
Here is the complet script. What I need is a progress bar for dd

red='\e[0;31m'
NC='\e[0m'
green='\e[1;32m'
folder="/externhdd/michel"

if [ -d /externhdd/michel ]; then
echo -n "Backup wird ausgeführt..."
nice -n 19 dd if=/dev/hda of=$folder/`date +%d.%m.%Y`.img
RETURN=0
until [ $RETURN -ne 0 ]; do
ps -fea | grep dd
RETURN=$?
sleep 1
done
chmod 600 -Rf $folder/`date +%d.%m.%Y`.img
if [ -e $folder/`date +%d.%m.%Y`.img ]; then
echo -n -e ${green}"done"${NC}
else
echo -n -e ${red}"FAILED"${NC}
fi
else
mount /externhdd
echo -n "Backup wird ausgeführt..."
nice -n 19 dd if=/dev/hda of=$folder/`date +%d.%m.%Y`.img
chmod 600 -Rf $folder/`date +%d.%m.%Y`.img
if [ -e $folder/`date +%d.%m.%Y`.img ]; then
echo -n -e ${green}"done"${NC}
else
echo -n -e ${red}"FAILED"${NC}
fi
fi

Hi Voyager, sorry but I have not explained myself.

First, you must run dd command in the background:

nice -n 19 dd if=/dev/hda of=$folder/`date +%d.%m.%Y`.img &

(note the & character at the end of the line)

It lets the script continue running (and doing anything else), and don't wait for dd to end.

Then, You come into the until loop. This loop will be executing while dd is running. You can place code after the sleep instruction. If you know the final size (more or less) of the .img file, you can test the .img file size every 1 (or more) seconds and show a percentage, megabytes written/left or anything else.

One thing more, use grep (in the until loop) with -q option (quiet, no output).

somewhat more clear?

Use kill -SIGUSR1 to have dd output how much it has copied so far.
From the man page of "dd":
I'll leave parsing its output to you