Add a Real‑Time Progress Bar to Linux cp and mv with advcpmv

This article introduces how to use the open‑source GitHub project advcpmv to add a progress bar to the Linux cp and mv commands.

Because cp and mv belong to the coreutils package, the main task is to apply a patch to coreutils during compilation to enable the progress‑bar feature.

# Avoid using the root user when possible
$ pwd
/home/tinychen

# Download coreutils
$ wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.32.tar.xz
$ tar -xJf coreutils-8.32.tar.xz
$ cd coreutils-8.32/

# Download the patch from GitHub
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jarun/advcpmv/master/advcpmv-0.8-8.32.patch
# Apply the patch to add progress‑bar support
$ patch -p1 -i advcpmv-0.8-8.32.patch
patching file src/copy.c
patching file src/copy.h
patching file src/cp.c
patching file src/mv.c

# Compile and install
$ ./configure
$ make
# Copy the patched binaries to /usr/local/bin
$ sudo cp src/cp /usr/local/bin/cp
$ sudo cp src/mv /usr/local/bin/mv

After installation, simply add the -g option when invoking cp or mv to show the progress bar. For convenience, you can create aliases in .bashrc:

$ alias cp='cp -ig'
$ alias mv='mv -ig'

Testing the effect, copying a large directory now displays total progress, per‑file progress, and average speed after completion.

$ cp -r /samba/Elements02/kvm/* /kvm/

0 files copied so far...                                   1.6 GiB /  67.2 GiB
[===>                                                     ]  2.4 %
Copying at 178.4 MiB/s (about 0h 6m 45s remaining)
/samba/Elements02/kvm/iso/CentOS-6.10-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso   1.6 GiB /   3.7 GiB
[========================================================================>               ] 43.4 %

Link: https://tinychen.com/20201128-add-progess-bar-in-cp-mv/

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