[[!tag usability planet-debian]]

As I get older, and more impatient, I find myself wanting every program to give more or less accurate estimates of the remaining time until it has completed whatever it is doing. This applies to command line utilities as well. In fact, since most of my time is spent on the command line, it applies particularly to command line utilities.

The thing I, as a user, want to know is how long I will still have to wait. I don't particularly care whether the program has completed 97.12765% of its job, I want to know whether it will still take seconds, minutes, hours, or longer to complete. Not remaining file counts. Not remaining byte counts. Time.

I'm interested in the entire task. If each file takes 0.1 seconds to process, that's fine, but I don't want to estimate myself that with fourteen thousand remaining files it's going to to take around 25 minutes more.

It doesn't have to be completely accurate; a reasonably good estimate is fine. It can fluctuate: when downloading over the Internet, transfer speeds sometimes vary. That's fine. Just give me the current estimate using the average recent speed.

For various reasons, I often deal with large files, in the multi-gigabyte range. Copying them with cp seems to be pretty effective, but it's annoying to have to set up something like "watch du -sh source.file target.file" to be able to track progress.

I could use "rsync --progress", but that only works well for a single file. Otherwise it reports remaining time for each file separately. I realize that rsync has a particularly difficult job for estimating the remaining time, since it is dependent on the contents of the files at either end. But it could try.

Because of these, I tend to like Nautilus for copying files. It has a pretty good indicator for remaining time. Unfortunately, that isn't always practical to use, either, since I don't always copy file so that the local host is at least one end of the transfer, and I often really want rsync.

One of the nice lesser-known utilities is pv (in Debian and Ubuntu in the package of the same name). It allows one to construct pipelines that estimate current remaining time. For example, I use this to fill a filesystem's empty space with zeroes:

pv -petrb -s "${guess}k" /dev/zero > temp

(where guess is the free space in kilobytes).

Sometimes the pipelines need to be somewhat contrived to fit pv in. This can also make them slower than straightforward ones would be. But it's often nicer to get some progress reporting than to optimize for speed, at least for stuff that you have to actually wait for in real time.