Backup & Recovery (Rsync/Tar/Dd)

Stop dd from leaving you guessing about your disk clone progress

🧩 The Challenge

You finally decide to clone that failing drive, but then you’re stuck staring at a blank terminal for three hours. Was it just slow, or did it actually hang at 40%?

💡 The Fix

You can force the process to spit out its status without killing it. It’s a lifesaver when you’re sweating over a dying disk.

kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd$)

⚙️ Why It Works

Sending the USR1 signal to a running dd process makes it dump the current I/O stats directly to your standard error output. The process keeps on trucking like nothing happened, but you get the update you needed.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Alias this to something like ‘ddstat’ so you don’t have to look up the signal number when you’re panicking.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 8/20/2026