Way to tell progress of ditto Terminal command?

Question

Level 2

154 points

Way to tell progress of ditto Terminal command?

Greetings,

Is there a way to tell the progress of a ditto copy in Terminal so I can see how long it is taking?

I am trying to copy about 500GB of files. I can't copy in the Finder because the whole operation stops if it can't copy a file.

Cloning with a program like Carbon Copy Cloner will take about 30 hours, so I don't want to clone, I just want to copy.

Thanks

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Mar 16, 2011 4:38 AM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

121,982 points

Mar 16, 2011 5:03 AM in response to Chuck Risher

Add a -v or -V to see what has been copied. See the man page:

man ditto

I don't think there is a progress meter, though.

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Answer 2

BobHarris

Level 9

56,741 points

Mar 16, 2011 9:49 AM in response to Chuck Risher

NOTE: Carbon Copy Cloner can copy a subset of the files. You just have to deselect the files and subdirectory trees you do not want to copy.

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Answer 3

Chuck Risher Author

Level 2

154 points

Mar 17, 2011 1:20 AM in response to Chuck Risher

I figured out I could watch the destination folder size change in the Finder.

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Answer 4

Mar 17, 2011 1:09 PM in response to Chuck Risher

One option you have is to use the -V flag to show the files being copied.

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Answer 5

Mar 18, 2011 7:48 AM in response to Chuck Risher

As several have said ditto -v from_here to_here will list files being copied. In my experience, usage of the -v/-V flags will slow things down when processing large numbers of files (terminal i/o buffer gets full and process pauses until it gets printed to the screen).

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