dd is typically used to copy or write into block devices and generally takes a while to complete. dd, by default, does not display the progress status of its operation, which sometimes could be stressful.

There are a few methods that you can use to display and monitor the progress of dd command from the terminal.

Steps to display progress of dd command:

  1. Run dd with status=progress argument. 

    $ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null status=progress 2755155968 bytes (2.8 GB, 2.6 GiB) copied, 5 s, 551 MB/s

    This method is only available in newer versions of dd in GNU coreutils and not available on variants such as the one in macOS.

  2. Send USR1 signal to running dd process. 

    $ kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd)

    dd responds to the signal by displaying the current status of its running operation.

  3. Use progress tool to display progress of dd and other tools' operation such as cp, tar and other common GNU utilities. 

    $ sudo apt install --assume-yes progress # Debian and Ubuntu $ progress -m