I stumbled across pv the other day and found it interesting. It is not so much a utility as eye-candy, but useful non-the-less.

from the man page: pv allows a user to see the progress of data through a pipeline, by giving information such as time elapsed, percentage completed (with progress bar), current throughput rate, total data transferred, and ETA.

First, install pv with what ever package manager you use.

• # cd /usr/ports/sysutils/pv && make install clean
• # apt-get install pv
• # yum install pv

Using pv is analogous to using cat, only with a progress bar and some extra goodies!

1. # pv file.iso | dd of=/dev/cd0 bs=64k

1. (server)
2. # pv file.iso > nc -l 4444
3. (client)
4. # nc host 444 > file.iso