Yeah .. I think I prefer pv for all my cp progressbar needs .. keeps things light and simple, and is already onboard.

I like pv, but I thought that it didn't work with "cp -r" (let alone mv)… Am I wrong?

It would be nice for cp and mv to just have built-in progress bars (only active in interactive mode, etc).

About 10 years back I tried to do this by defining terminal escape codes for this. I was also implementing a new terminal as a POC. Unfortunately didn't find the time to go beyond it.

Here's the POC if anyone would like to take it further: http://anthias.sourceforge.net/

pv is by no means a standard include. Also the obvious advantage here is being able to monitor progress for processes you didn't pipe to pv initially (e.g., forgot or didn't think it would be a long transfer).

pv is just cat with a progress bar, so it only handles the case where you are copying a single big file.

Indeed. You can use it to show the progress of a recursive directory copy with this trick:

tar c -C /tmp/source . | pv | tar x -C /tmp/dest

you can also pass an approximated size of your source to pv, however the tar output will be slightly bigger.

how would you estimate the size quickly? 'du' can take quite long

You can start pv without an estimated size, run du in the background, and then supply the estimate to pv once it's calculated using the '-R' (remote control) option.

A bit clumsy, but it shouldn't be hard to write a little script to do it.

Cool, didn't know about that pv had a remote control.

Anyway, if cp -R had a progress bar it would behave the same way, i.e. it would have first to recursively stat the source the same way as du does, and only then it could start reporting a completion percentage.