The “dd” tool is very useful for cloning/backing up/erasing partitions and harddrives. However all these tasks take a long time and the “dd” command does not output status messages on the screen. You never know how much time the process will need to complete or how much data has already been processed.

Luckily there is a hidden way to get this information. Get a command prompt and enter the command below. Replace “Process-Id” by the id of the “dd” process, which can be obtained by “ps -A”.

kill -SIGUSR1 Process-Id