Effortlessly Write Files to Tape with tar, pv, and Get Progress Bar

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss how to use the Tape archive utility with the pv progress bar and Get Progress Bar tools to write files more efficiently and monitor the progress of the archiving process.

Prerequisites

To follow this article, you will need:

• A Linux system with Tape, pv, and Get Progress Bar installed.

Writing Files with Tape and pv

Tape is a powerful archiving utility that supports creating and reading various types of tape formats. It is often used for backing up large amounts of data. By piping the output of Tape to pv, we can monitor the progress of the archiving process in real-time.

Here's an example of writing a file using Tape and pv:

In the above example, we create a new archive using the "cvf" option, which writes the archive to a tape device. We pipe the output to pv, which sets the size of the archive to 10 megabytes using the "-s" option.

Viewing the Contents of a Tape

To view the contents of a tape, we can use the "tvf" option with Tape and pipe the output to pv:

Writing Files with Tape, pv, and Get Progress Bar

Get Progress Bar is a simple and lightweight tool for displaying progress bars in the terminal. We can use it in combination with Tape and pv to display a more detailed progress bar.

Here's an example of writing a file using Tape, pv, and Get Progress Bar:

In the above example, we use the same command as before to create a new archive and pipe the output to pv. We then pipe the output of pv to Get Progress Bar using the "--quiet" and "--auto" options to display a progress bar automatically.

Conclusion

Tape is a powerful archiving utility that can be used to write files to tape devices. By piping the output of Tape to pv and Get Progress Bar, we can monitor the progress of the archiving process in real-time and display a detailed progress bar. This can be especially useful when working with large amounts of data.

References

• Tar Manual
• PV Manual
• Get Progress Bar