As great as Linux/Bash is, sometimes I wish some of the built-in commands did a little bit more than the bare minimum. Of these the 'cp' command is something that I always thought should have had a way to show progress when copying files. There are many questions about this very thing on StackExchange like this one and this one. My preferred solution is to use 'rsync' but I'm also a big fan of simplifying things and can never remember all the various command line options required. So this post shows my little trick to enabling file copy speed and percentage display when copying files.

I simply add the following line to my ~/.profile file:


Then I can do something like this...


...and the results look like this:




Lets see what those command line options all mean.


As a bonus, since 'rsync' is used as the underlying command to copy files, you can also copy files from remote servers, much like when using 'scp'.

Here's another useful alias I've created: Add a filter/search option to the OS X Terminal history command

-i