Progress bar

[GrabbenD]

This tool is a lifesaver but with larger system installations it can take quite a while to finish and a progress bar would be very useful. For instance, when using the dd tool this can be accomplished with fsync:

dd if=/dev/nvme0n1p3 bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync | bzip2 > /mnt/nvme1n1/backup.bz2

Are there actually any existing methods to view the progress of mkstage4?

[TheChymera]

I agree that this could be useful, though I'm not entirely sure how to do this in a way that supports the various compression algorithms. If you have a suggestion I'd be happy to review it.

[GrabbenD]

Good point @TheChymera

I've switched to NixOS since Gentoo was consuming too much of my free time. Nix ecosystem also offers incredibly fast rollbacks and OS configuration switching

[antonellocaroli]

@TheChymera it would probably suffice to add to

TAR_OPTIONS=(
	-cpP
	--ignore-failed-read
	"--xattrs-include=*.*"
	--numeric-owner
        --checkpoint=.500
	"--use-compress-prog=${COMP_OPTIONS[*]}"
	)

[TheChymera]

@antonellocaroli that just prints a period every 0.5 seconds, not really a progress bar since it's not relative to anything. Not sure if tar can even correctly guess how far into the operation it is.

I guess the --checkpoint-action parameter might be usable to contrive something, but this and other approaches I could track down, seem to gobble stdout, which is quite vital to notify you of any files that might have changed while reading...