For copying large files or large directories, it's helpful to have a progress bar showing percentage completed, speed of the copy, how much time remaining, etc.

This is usually available in Xwindows filemanagers (such as those in KDE, Gnome, xfce, etc), but when using the command line / terminal, the 'cp' command doesn't show progress.

Options:

• Instead of using 'cp' you can use one of several scripts written for copying a file and showing the progress.  However, some of them use "strace" which slows down the copy process.
• The vcp program shows progress using ncurses.
• You can use the bar program, but it has it's own unique syntax.
• Old versions of cp used to be able to show a progress bar using a "-prog" argument/parameter, but they don't do that anymore.
  • However, for the adventurous, there is a patch for coreutils you can use to reimplement that feature.
• SCP can be used locally to show progress (only on each individual file, not the total progress (if you are copying multiple files at once)):
  • scp -rp -P [port]  [relative path of source/]  localhost:[absolute path to destination]
  • The "localhost:" section is needed because without it SCP will just pass the copy command off to cp and won't do the copy itself.
• Worst case, you can use the "time" command with "cp" and then cancel the "cp" while it's running.    Then check to see how much "cp" copied in the amount of time given.