How can I make a progress bar while copying a directory with cp?
You can also use rsync instead of cp like this:
rsync -Pa source destination
Which will give you a progress bar and estimated time of completion. Very handy.
To show a progress bar while doing a recursive copy of files & folders & subfolders (including links and file attributes), you can use gcp (easily installed in Ubuntu and Debian by running "sudo apt-get install gcp"):
gcp -rf SRC DESTHere is the typical output while copying a large folder of files:
Copying 1.33 GiB 73% |##################### | 230.19 M/s ETA: 00:00:07Notice that it shows just one progress bar for the whole operation, whereas if you want a single progress bar per file, you can use rsync:
rsync -ah --progress SRC DEST
You may have a look at the tool vcp. Thats a simple copy tool with two progress bars: One for the current file, and one for overall.
EDIT
Here is the link to the sources: http://members.iinet.net.au/~lynx/vcp/Manpage can be found here: http://linux.die.net/man/1/vcp
Most distributions have a package for it.