&gt; The other way to see progress on `dd` is to issue a signal 3 (USR1, iirc) to the dd process. kill -3 &lt;dd pid&gt;<p>Be careful with this on some distributions and compilations of DD.  Purely anecdotal evidence, but in college I had a friend imaging a very large (5400RPM) drive and about 10 hours into the process he lamented that he wished he could see how far along it was.<p>I popped open a terminal, ps -A |grep dd, kill -USR1 $PID, and it just exited.<p>He was rather pissed that I lost him 10 hours.