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Advanced Copy

Advanced Copy is a mod for the GNU cp and GNU mv tools. 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.

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 the latest patchfile (current version 0.3 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/advcpmv-0.3-8.4.patch
$ patch -p1 -i advcpmv-0.3-8.4.patch
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo cp src/cp /usr/bin/cp
$ sudo cp src/mv /usr/bin/mv

This will replace your existing cp and mv commands. Whenever you want a progress bar you can now use cp -g or mv -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'
alias mv='mv -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

August 26, 2010
Thanks to Phil Schäfer for a new patch which adds the progress bar to GNU mv (v0.3).

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

Last update: September 18, 2010 - Florian Zwicke
(mail address: info at this domain)