James Leighton

Monitoring mv and other quiet commands with watch and progress

mv gives you no progress output at all, which is not much fun when you are moving 100+GB of Google Takeout archives and cannot tell if anything is happening.

Two tools fix this: watch and progress. With your move already running, open a second terminal and enter the following:

watch progress -w

This refreshes every 2 seconds and shows a live view of the running process.

Progress probably needs installing first, but it is a quick job with your package manager. On Bazzite, I installed it using brew (brew install progress)


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