progress_bar.sh

Progress bar for the shell

Display a progress bar for $1 seconds.

It uses partial Unicode blocks to achieve subcharacter precision.

Example:

source progress_bar.sh
progress_bar 60
│█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████▌                                  │ 62%

You can time a long task and use it to have an idea of how much longer to wait

time ./compile.sh    # gives 300 seconds
./compile.sh &>/dev/null & progress_bar 300
│███████████████████████████████                                                             │ 31%

It requires a terminal session with unicode locales, for instance

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8

Details at Own Your Bits