“Pipe Viewer, or just pv when you’re invoking it at the command
line or in scripts, is a utility for monitoring data flowing
through a pipeline. It gives you an idea of how fast the data is
moving through the pipeline, how long it’s taken so far, and when
it will be finished. It’s the digital answer to the administrative
question, “are we there yet?”Pipe Viewer is not installed by default on most distros I’ve
seen, so you’ll need to look for packages on some systems. It’s
packaged for Debian and Ubuntu, so you can grab pv with the
standard apt-get install pv dance.