Pipe Viewer - is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion.
Additional support is available for multiple instances working in tandem, to given a visual indicator of relative throughput in a complex pipeline:
- CentOS / RHEL: Set up YUM repository or use RepoForge, then do "yum install pv".
- Fedora: Run "yum install pv" (the "extras" repository may be required).
- Debian / Ubuntu: Run "apt-get install pv" to get the latest packaged version from "unstable" / "testing". (Debian QA page here.)
- Slackware: Use this SlackBuild script.
- Cygwin: Available as a package. (Christian Franke)
- FreeBSD: Listed on FreshPorts.
- OpenBSD: Listed under ports.
- Solaris: Download binary packages from sunfreeware.com or from OpenCSW.
- OpenSolaris: Includes pv version 1.1.4 in the "/dev" repository (as of build 119). Install with "pkg install SUNWpipe-viewer". (Menno Lageman)
- AIX: An RPM from Pawel Piatek is in the downloads section.
- MacPorts: Run "port install pv" to get the latest version. (Brandon Crawford)
- Mac HomeBrew: Run "brew install pv" to get the latest version. (Justin Campbell)
- Exherbo: Run "cave resolve -x app-misc/pv" to get the latest version. (Wulf C. Krueger)
- Gentoo: Run "emerge sys-apps/pv" to get the latest version. (S. Lockwood-Childs; update from Peter Broadwell)
- IRIX Nekoware: Available in the Nekoware "beta" repository. (Mark Round)
- Syabas PopcornHour: Someone posted this port in a forum.
./configure
make
make install
A manual page is included in this distribution. See 'man ./doc/quickref.1', or 'man pv' after installation.
make uninstall
This package is copyright 2015 Andrew Wood, and is being distributed under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0. For more details of this license, see the file `doc/COPYING'.
Report bugs in `pv' to pv@ivarch.com or use the contact form linked from the home page.
The `pv' home page is at:
http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml
The latest version can always be found here.
Credit is also due to:
Jakub Hrozek jhrozek@redhat.com
- Fedora package maintainer
Antoine Beaupré anarcat@debian.org
- Debian package maintainer
Kevin Coyner kcoyner@debian.org Cédric Delfosse cedric@debian.org
- previous Debian package maintainers
Eduardo Aguiar eduardo.oliveira@sondabrasil.com.br
- provided Portuguese (Brazilian) translation
Stéphane Lacasse stephane@gorfou.ca
- provided French translation
Marcos Kreinacke public@kreinacke.com
- provided German translation
Bartosz Fenski fenio@o2.pl http://skawina.eu.org/
- provided Polish translation along with Krystian Zubel
Joshua Jensen
- reported RPM installation bug
Boris Folgmann http://www.folgmann.com/en/
- reported cursor handling bug
Mathias Gumz
- reported NLS bug
Daniel Roethlisberger
- submitted patch to use lockfiles for -c if terminal locking fails
Adam Buchbinder
- lots of help with a Cygwin port of -c
Mark Tomich http://metuchen.dyndns.org
- suggested -B option
Gert Menke
- reported bug when piping to dd with a large input buffer size
Ville Herva Ville.Herva@iki.fi
- informative bug report about rate limiting performance
Elias Pipping
- patch to compile properly on Darwin 9; potential NULL deref report
Patrick Collison
- similar patch for OS X
Boris Lohner
- reported problem that "-L" does not complain if given non-numeric value
Sebastian Kayser
- supplied testing for SIGPIPE, demonstrated internationalisation problem
Laszlo Ersek http://phptest11.atw.hu/
- reported shared memory leak on SIGINT with -c
Phil Rutschman http://bandgap.rsnsoft.com/
- provided a patch for fully restoring terminal state on exit
Henry Precheur http://henry.precheur.org/
- reporting and suggestions for --rate-limit bug when rate is under 10
E. Rosten http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~er258/
- supplied patch for block buffering in line mode
Kjetil Torgrim Homme
- reported compilation error with default CFLAGS on non-GCC compilers
Alexandre de Verteuil
- reported bug in OS X build and supplied test environment to fix in
Martin Baum
- supplied patch to return nonzero exit status if terminated by signal
Sam Nelson http://www.siliconfuture.net/
- supplied patch to fix trailing slash on DESTDIR
Daniel Pape
- reported Cygwin installation problem due to DESTDIR
Philipp Beckers
- ported to the Syabas PopcornHour A-100 series
Henry Gebhard hsggebhardt@googlemail.com
- supplied patches to improve SI prefixes and add --average-rate
Vladimir Kokarev, Alexander Leo
- reported that exit status did not reflect file errors
Thomas Rachel
- submitted patches for IEEE1541 (MiB suffixes), 1+e03 bug
Guillaume Marcais
- submitted speedup patch for line mode
Moritz Barsnick
- submitted patch for compile warning in size calculation
Pawel Piatek
- submitted RPM and patches for AIX
Sami Liedes
- submitted patch for --timer and --bytes with --numeric
Steven Willis
- reported problem with "-R" killing non-PV remote processes
Vladimir Pal, Vladimir Ermakov
- submitted patch which led to development of --format option
Peter Samuelson peter@p12n.org
- submitted patch to calculate size if stdout is a block device
Miguel Diaz
- much Cygwin help (and packaging), found narrow-terminal bug
Jim Salter http://ubuntuwiki.net
- commissioned work on the --skip-errors option
Wouter Pronk
- reported build problem on SCO
Bryan Dongray http://www.dongrays.com
- provided patches for test scripts failing on older Red Hats
Zev Weiss <www.bewilderbeest.net>
- provided patch to fix splice() not using stdin
Zing Shishak
- provided patch for --null / -0 (count null terminated lines)
Jacek Wielemborek http://deetah.jogger.pl/kategorie/english
- implemented fdwatch in Python, suggested PV port
- reported bug with "-l" and ETA / size
Kim Krecht
- suggested buffer fill status and last bytes output display options
Cristian Ciupitu http://ciupicri.github.io, Josh Stone
- pointed out file descriptor leak with helpful suggestions (Josh Stone initially noticed the missing close)
Jan Seda
- found issue with splice() and SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK causing slowdown
André Stapf
- pointed out formatting problem e.g. 13GB -> 13.1GB which should be shown 13.0GB -> 13.1GB; highlighted on-startup row swapping in -c
Damon Harper http://www.usrbin.ca/
- suggested "-D" / "--delay-start" option
Ganaël Laplanche http://www.martymac.org
- provided patch for lstat64 on systems that do not support it
Peter Korsgaard http://www.buildroot.net/
- provided similar patch for lstat64, specifically for uClibc support
Ralf Ramsauer https://blog.ramses-pyramidenbau.de/
- reported bug which dropped transfer rate on terminal resize
Michiel Van Herwegen
- reported and discussed bug with "-l" and ETA / size
Erkki Seppälä http://www.inside.org/~flux/
- provided patch implementing "-I"
####News
1.6.6 - 30 June 2017
(r161) use %llu instead of %Lu for better compatibility (Eric A. Borisch)
(r162) (#1532) fix target buffer size (-B) being ignored (AndCycle, Ilya Basin, Antoine Beaupré)
(r164) cap read/write sizes, and check elapsed time during read/write cycles, to avoid display hangs with large buffers or slow media; also remove select() call from repeated_write function as it slows the transfer down and the wrapping alarm() means it is unnecessary
(r169) (#1477) use alternate form for transfer counter, such that 13GB is shown as 13.0GB so it's the same width as 13.1GB (André Stapf)
(r171) cleanup: units corrections in man page, of the form kb -> KiB
(r175) report error in "-d" if process fd directory is unreadable, or if process disappears before we start the main loop (Jacek Wielemborek)
1.6.0 - 15 March 2015
fix lstat64 support when unavailable - separate patches supplied by Ganael Laplanche and Peter Korsgaard
(#1506) new option "-D" / "--delay-start" to only show bar after N seconds (Damon Harper)
new option "--fineta" / "-I" to show ETA as time of day rather than time remaining - patch supplied by Erkki Seppälä (r147)
(#1509) change ETA (--eta / -e) so that days are given if the hours remaining are 24 or more (Jacek Wielemborek)
(#1499) repeat read and write attempts on partial buffer fill/empty to work around post-signal transfer rate drop reported by Ralf Ramsauer
(#1507) do not try to calculate total size in line mode, due to bug reported by Jacek Wielemborek and Michiel Van Herwegen
cleanup: removed defunct RATS comments and unnecessary copyright notices
clean up displayed lines when using --watchfd PID, when PID exits
output errors on a new line to avoid overwriting transfer bar
1.5.7 - 26 August 2014
show KiB instead of incorrect kiB (Debian bug #706175)
(#1284) do not gzip man page, for non-Linux OSes (Bob Friesenhahn)
work around awk bug in tests/016-numeric-timer in decimal "," locales
fix "make rpm" and "make srpm", extend "make release" to sign releases
1.5.3 - 4 May 2014
remove SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK to fix problem with slow splice() (Jan Seda)
1.5.2 - 10 February 2014
allow --watchfd to look at block devices
let --watchfd PID:FD work with --size N
moved contributors out of the manual as the list was too long
(NB everyone is still listed in the README and always will be)
1.5.1 - 23 January 2014
new option --watchfd - suggested by Jacek Wielemborek and "fdwatch"
use non-block flag with splice()
new display option --buffer-percent, suggested by Kim Krecht
new display option --last-written, suggested by Kim Krecht
new transfer option --no-splice
fix for minor bug which dropped display elements after one empty one
fix for single fd leak on exit (Cristian Ciupitu)
1.4.12 - 5 August 2013
new option --null - patch supplied by Zing Shishak
AIX build fix (add -lc128) - with help from Pawel Piatek
AIX -c fixes - with help from Pawel Piatek
SCO build fix (po2table.sh) - reported by Wouter Pronk
test scripts fix for older distributions - patch from Bryan Dongray
fix for splice() not using stdin - patch from Zev Weiss
1.4.6 - 22 January 2013
added patch from Pawel Piatek to omit O_NOFOLLOW in AIX
1.4.5 - 10 January 2013
updated manual page to show known problem with "-R" on Cygwin
1.4.4 - 11 December 2012
added debugging, see "pv -h" when configure run with "--enable-debugging"
rewrote cursor positioning code used when IPC is unavailable (Cygwin)
fixed cursor positioning cursor read answerback problem (Cygwin/Solaris)
ixed bug causing crash when progress displayed with too-small terminal
1.4.0 - 6 December 2012
new option --skip-errors commissioned by Jim Salter
if stdout is a block device, and we don't know the total size, use the size of that block device as the total (Peter Samuelson)
new option --stop-at-size to stop after --size bytes
report correct filename on read errors
fix use-after-free bug in remote PID cleanup code
refactored large chunks of code to make it more readable and to replace most static variables with a state structure
1.3.9 - 5 November 2012
allow --format parameters to be sent with --remote
configure option --disable-ipc
added tests for --numeric with --timer and --bytes
added tests for --remote
1.3.8 - 29 October 2012
new --pidfile option to save process ID to a file
integrated patch for --numeric with --timer and --bytes (Sami Liedes)
removed signalling from --remote to prevent accidental process kills
new --format option (originally Vladimir Pal / Vladimir Ermakov)
(23 July 2012)
Christian Franke reports that PV is available in Cygwin.
1.3.4 - 27 June 2012
new --disable-splice configure script option
fixed line mode size count with multiple files (Moritz Barsnick)
fixes for AIX core dumps (Pawel Piatek)
1.3.1 - 9 June 2012
do not use splice() if the write buffer is not empty (Thomas Rachel)
added test 15 (pipe transfers), and new test script
1.3.0 - 5 June 2012
This version had a bug in splice() handling which could in some circumstances corrupt data. Use 1.3.1 or newer.
added Tiger build patch from Olle Jonsson
fix 1024-boundary display garble (Debian bug #586763)
use splice(2) where available (Debian bug #601683)
added known bugs section of the manual page
fixed average rate test, 12 (Andrew Macheret)
use IEEE1541 units (Thomas Rachel)
bug with rate limit under 10 fixed (Henry Precheur)
speed up PV line mode (patch: Guillaume Marcais)
remove LD=ld from vars.mk to fix cross-compilation (paintitgray/PV#1291)
(19 July 2011)
AIX RPM supplied by Pawel Piatek (see downloads)
1.2.0 - 14 December 2010
integrated improved SI prefixes and --average-rate (Henry Gebhardt)
return nonzero if exiting due to SIGTERM (Martin Baum)
patch from Phil Rutschman to restore terminal properly on exit
fix i18n especially for --help (Sebastian Kayser)
refactored pv_display
we now have a coherent, documented, exit status
modified pipe test and new cksum test from Sebastian Kayser
default CFLAGS to just "-O" for non-GCC (Kjetil Torgrim Homme)
LFS compile fix for OS X 10.4 (Alexandre de Verteuil)
remove DESTDIR / suffix (Sam Nelson, Daniel Pape)
fixed potential NULL deref in transfer (Elias Pipping / LLVM/Clang)