progress bar for console utilities

On duty, I occasionally have to copy, archive, unzip, and perform other standard actions with large files. Console utilities, such as cp, tar or cat, do an excellent job with their task, but one small problem arises: suppose that you need to archive a 500 MB SQL dump, this operation can be performed on an average hardware for 5 - 10 minutes and , standard tar does not display any progress bar, i.e. the console seems to freeze and only by opening the top in the next window you can understand that something is happening. I think it will be much more convenient if the progress bar appears in the console as in the same scp and then the user will be more aware of how long he has to wait until the operation is completed.

When I asked Google, I realized that I was far from the first to be concerned about this problem and that an interesting bash script bar was written by good people. How it works can be seen in the picture:



The script is executed in the best traditions of the unix-way: it perfectly does the only task assigned to it - it draws a progress bar, and it can also be used in chains of commands.
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The script works in most popular systems, such as Linux, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc. Download the script and learn more about its work on the project page: http://www.theiling.de/projects/bar.html