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Advanced Copy

Advanced Copy is a mod for the GNU cp tool. Currently it adds a progress bar to show you what's going on while you're waiting for the process to finish.

Be aware that this program is still in its earliest stages. There's still some bugs to be fixed and many cool features missing, but I promise to work on it in the months to come. If you have any suggestions, feel free to contact me via mail or ICQ (see bottom of page for details).

There's also a Freshmeat project page.

This program is released under the GNU General Public License.

Download

First you need the original version of GNU coreutils. My current mod is based on coreutils-8.4 (released Jan 13, 2010).

Then you need my latest patchfile (current version 0.2b alpha). The whole installation should be kind of like this:

$ wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.4.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf coreutils-8.4.tar.gz
$ cd coreutils-8.4/
$ wget http://beatex.org/web/advcopy/advcopy-0.2b-8.4.patch
$ patch -p1 -i advcopy-0.2b-8.4.patch
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo cp src/cp /usr/bin/cp

This will replace your existing cp command. Whenever you want a progress bar for a copy process you can now use cp -g.
If you want the progress bar to be shown all the time, you can add the following to your ~/.bashrc:

alias cp='cp -g'

Alternatively to building from source, you could try using this pre-compiled static executable for Linux.

Usage

cp can be used just like before after applying the patch. The only change is the new -g (or --progress-bar) option: 
$ cp -gR BigFolder NewFolder/

1469 files copied so far...                          130.2 MiB / 298.7 MiB
[|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||------------------------------------] 43.6 %
Copying at  23.4 MiB/s (about 0h 0m 31s remaining)
BigFolder/automation/delegates/class-list.jpeg         1.5 MiB /   2.0 MiB
[|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||------------------] 75.0 %

Changes

January 26, 2010
Thanks to Bartosz Swiatek for a patch that adds a -g and --progress-bar option to the program. You can now replace your current cp executable and use cp -g whenever you want a progress bar (v0.2b).

January 25, 2010
Second alpha version of Advanced Copy (v0.2) is released. The tool now calculates the current speed and estimates the remaining time.

January 25, 2010
First alpha version of Advanced Copy (v0.1) is released.

Screenshots

Advanced Copy 0.2, Progress Bar, by Florian Zwicke
v0.2 alpha

Advanced Copy 0.1, Progress Bar, by Florian Zwicke
v0.1 alpha

ToDo

Last update: January 25, 2010 - Florian Zwicke
(mail address: info at this domain)