Fair enough Pádraig. Felt it was a bit overkill/overcomplex with pv, but it does solve the problem. With a bit of string processing (irritatingly pv does not combine -F format with -n plain integer output).
This is my solution (with sed to prepend '\r' and tr to eat '\n' and echo to add a '\n' at the very end) : tar -tf big.tar | pv -i 0.1 -lbnX 2>&1 | stdbuf -o0 sed -e 's/^/\r/' | stdbuf -o0 tr -d '\n'; echo; A small timing test on 1,000,000,000 lines shows that the overhead is negligible (and I learnt that 'seq' is significantly slower than 'yes | head') $ time { yes | head -n 1000000000 >/dev/null ; } real 0m1,976s user 0m1,539s sys 0m1,155s $ time { yes | head -n 1000000000 | wc -l ; } 1000000000 real 0m2,545s user 0m2,043s sys 0m2,359s $ time { yes | head -n 1000000000 | pv -i 0.1 -lbnX 2>&1 | stdbuf -o0 sed -e 's/^/\r/' | stdbuf -o0 tr -d '\n'; echo; } 1000000000 real 0m2,649s user 0m3,889s sys 0m2,085s Cheers! / Joakim On 2024-11-15 17:57, Pádraig Brady wrote: On 15/11/2024 15:40, Joakim Lindblad wrote: I'm often using 'wc' for stuff that takes a long time, e.g. 'tar -tf big.tar | wc -l' to count the files in an archive. Here I am lacking some intermediate feedback from the process. Does a "--progress" version of 'wc' exist? I am envisioning a continuous count with a simple line-wise overwrite a'la '\r'. I fail to find the option, and I don't find the feature request rejected https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/rejected_requests.html#wc I could potentially volunteer to implement it (but am happy not to). Yes this does seem like useful functionality, however it's already implemented in `pv --line-mode`, so I don't see an advantage to implementing in wc. For example: while :; do seq 10; sleep 1; done | pv --line-mode > /dev/null thanks, Pádraig VARNING: Klicka inte på länkar och öppna inte bilagor om du inte känner igen avsändaren och vet att innehållet är säkert. CAUTION: Do not click on links or open attachments unless you recognise the sender and know the content is safe. -- _______________________________________________________________ Joakim Lindblad, PhD, Docent E-mail: joa...@cb.uu.se<mailto:joa...@cb.uu.se> Prof. Computerized Image Processing Phone: +46-733-168549 Dept. of IT, Uppsala University http://cb.uu.se/~joakim _______________________________________________________________ När du har kontakt med oss på Uppsala universitet med e-post så innebär det att vi behandlar dina personuppgifter. För att läsa mer om hur vi gör det kan du läsa här: http://www.uu.se/om-uu/dataskydd-personuppgifter/ E-mailing Uppsala University means that we will process your personal data. For more information on how this is performed, please read here: http://www.uu.se/en/about-uu/data-protection-policy