cli-tarHow can I track the progress of a Unix tar operation?

To track the progress of a Unix tar operation, you can use the --totals flag in the tar command. This flag will print out the total number of files and the total number of bytes written to the archive.

For example:

$ tar --totals -cf archive.tar /path/to/files
Total bytes written: 2097152 (2.0MiB, 2.1MB)
Total number of files: 3

The command consists of the following parts:

• tar: the command that creates the archive
• --totals: the flag that prints out the progress information
• -cf: the flags that indicate to tar to create a file archive
• archive.tar: the file name of the archive
• /path/to/files: the directory containing the files to archive

For more information, see GNU tar Manual.

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