progress: Monitor cp, mv, dd, tar and Other Commands in Linux

Updated: 29 September 2026 · Applies to: progress 0.17 on Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04, Debian 13 (package), and AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux 9 and 10 (built from source)

progress (formerly "Coreutils Viewer") shows how far running copy and archive commands have got: cp, mv, dd, tar, gzip, rsync, sha256sum and many more. It looks at the files those programs have open in /proc and compares the read position with the file size, so it works with commands that are already running and have no progress bar of their own. We tested progress 0.17 on Debian 13 and built it on AlmaLinux 9.

Install on Ubuntu and Debian

apt install progress

Build on AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux and RHEL

progress is not in these distributions or EPEL, but it builds in seconds:

dnf install gcc make ncurses-devel
cd /usr/local/src
curl -L -o progress-0.17.tar.gz https://github.com/Xfennec/progress/archive/refs/tags/v0.17.tar.gz
tar xzf progress-0.17.tar.gz
cd progress-0.17
make && make install

This installs /usr/local/bin/progress.

Use it

progress              # show all supported commands that are running now
progress -w           # also estimate throughput and remaining time
progress -m           # keep updating until the commands finish
progress -M           # keep watching, also for commands started later
progress -c rsync     # only rsync
progress -p 12345     # only process 12345

Example output while gzip compressed a 286 MiB file in our test:

[18873] gzip /tmp/big.bin
        63.8% (182.5 MiB / 286.1 MiB) 59.8 MiB/s remaining 0:00:01

A handy pattern is to start a long copy and watch it in the same terminal:

cp -r /data /backup & progress -mp $!

Good to know

• Run it as the same user as the command, or as root, to see other users' processes.
• It shows progress through the file currently being read. For a folder copy with many files, the percentage restarts with each file.
• Commands that read from a pipe instead of a file have no size to compare, so progress cannot show a percentage for them. For pipelines, pv is the better tool.

Official documentation: progress on GitHub.