Hardware & Software

Recently, I found about a nice tool for showing the progress when extracting a compressed tar file on the command line: pv. pv monitors the progress of data as it goes through a pipe, so we need to send the file to tar using a pipe:

$ pv file.tgz | tar xzf - -C target_directory

This will show elapsed time, percentage completed with a progress bar and an estimated time to completion (ETA), something like this

1.16MB 0:00:20 [6.06MB/s] [==================>               ] 55%  ETA 0:00:37

Some more info about pv and examples at: A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer.

Nicer progress bar using dialog

I’ve been writing some simple BASH scripts lately (no, I’m not good with bash), and was looking for a method to get notified when certain parts of the scripts finished, I’ve found notify-send serves perfectly for this purpose, besides being used by Epiphany for notifying when a new message arrives .

Get notify-send

# aptitude install libnotify-bin

Test it

$ notify-send Title Message

This will show a notification balloon on the top rigth corner of your screen with the indicated title and message. Really, it’s been really useful for my everyday use, I can start a batch process and go on with my other activities, then I receive a notification when the process finishes or requires my attention .

A very simple example is to compile a big program such as alsa:

$ ./configure && make && notify-send "Ready to install"

Or a more elaborated and really nice one .