:date: 2012-09-20 11:33

.. index:: tech, code, bash, linux

Pipe viewer
===========

.. image:: http://www.ivarch.com/programs/images/pv.png
   :alt: Pipe viewer
   :align: center

This morning, quite in a hurry, I just wanted to clean up my USB stick before rushing to work. And as always when you're in a rush it takes forever until it finishes. If it finishes at all.

My problem was that I didn't know how long it would take until the files have been copied or moved and I had to wait in front of the monitor. Instead I could have done something else and come back to it later when the task had finished.

Now the _pain_ had become strong enough and I decided to fix this issue. Once and for all.

A bit of research and I found the tool `pipe viewer <http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml>`__.

One way of copying a single file would be like this:

.. code:: bash

   $ pv <file> > <destination>/<file>

The tools isn't quite intuitive at a first glance, but let me help out here:

It works basically like `cat <http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl1_cat.htm>`__.

Since I wasn't the first one with this problem, I quickly stumbled over several solutions and scenarios where *pipe viewer* could be use: compressing, copying, decompressing, bla, bla, bla. Since copying and moving was the only thing I'm interested in I found this code snipped on `Commandlinefu <http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6862/function-for-copy-files-with-progress-bar-using-pv-pipe-viewer>`__:

.. code:: bash

   # http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6862/function-for-copy-files-with-progress-bar-using-pv-pipe-viewer Link
   cp_p() {
     if [ `echo "$2" | grep ".*\/$"` ]; then
       pv "$1" > "$2""$1";
     else
       pv "$1" > "$2"/"$1";
     fi
   }

It works great for one file and fails when handling multiple. But I need it for several files, preferably working as similar as possible to the copy and move commands I'm used to. So I took the freshly gained knowledge and put everything in a small shell script.

Well, that seems to work.