Adding Progress Bars to cp and mv in Gutsy

Erik — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 07:07:00 +0000

Notice that I can do a -g for a progess bar! Yay! Now for an action shot:


hank@rofl:~/tmp/coreutils-6.7$ cp -g coreutils_6.7-1_i386.deb /nexus/mod0/www/deb/binary/
coreutils_6.7-1_i386.deb         |  48% |   3.2 MiB |   118 KiB/s | ETA

The Easy Way

Hopefully coming soon…

The Hard Way

WARNING! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK! THIS BROKE MY SYSTEM AND I WENT BACK TO THE DEFAULT COREUTILS PACKAGE

Get coreutils 6.7
Get the corresponding patches
Edit patch/generic/001_all_coreutils-gen-progress-bar.patch with vim:


:%s/coreutils\///g

Patch the tree with patch -p0 < patch/generic/001_all_coreutils-gen-progress-bar.patch
Run a magical loop:


# From http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3691686&postcount=2
for file in src/{copy,touch}.c lib/utimens.{c,h} ; do \
   cp -v $file{,.orig}
   sed 's/futimens/gl_&/' $file.orig > $file
done

./configure --prefix=/ && make && sudo checkinstall
Restart your terminal

Make sure you don’t completely hose your system and end up having to do this:


hank@rofl:~/tmp/coreutils-6.7/src$ sudo ./cp rm cp mv /bin/

Yes, that’s me using the cp binary from the current working directory to copy itself and some friends to /bin to resurrect my coreutils…

Also, I found out that there is a core package that externally manages the hostname command exclusively, and dpkg whines when you try to overwrite it with the awesome coreutils one. I don’t currently know how to make dpkg just do it’s job. Here’s the output:


hank@rofl:~/tmp/coreutils-6.7$ sudo dpkg -i coreutils_6.7-1_i386.deb
(Reading database ... 235274 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace coreutils 5.97-5.3ubuntu3 (using coreutils_6.7-1_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement coreutils ...
dpkg: error processing coreutils_6.7-1_i386.deb (--install):
 trying to overwrite `/bin/hostname', which is also in package hostname
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
 coreutils_6.7-1_i386.deb

If I can get that small bug fixed, I can actually implement the Easy Way. I ended up conceeding to a dirty, dirty make install. I also found out that you need a Depends: entry in each deb package even if it just contains bash. Apt is apparently pretty stupid about parsing Package files from repositories.

The Result


hank@rofl:~$ mv --help
Usage: mv [OPTION]... [-T] SOURCE DEST
  or:  mv [OPTION]... SOURCE... DIRECTORY
  or:  mv [OPTION]... -t DIRECTORY SOURCE...
Rename SOURCE to DEST, or move SOURCE(s) to DIRECTORY.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
      --backup[=CONTROL]       make a backup of each existing destination file
  -b                           like --backup but does not accept an argument
  -f, --force                  do not prompt before overwriting
  -g, --progress               show a progress bar if operation is going to
                                 take a long time
# ...