Mailing the story:
Tips from an RHCE: How can I make dd give me a progress report?
If you’ve been working with Linux very long, you’ve probably encountered dd, the deceptively simple utility for copying a stream of data from here to there. You may have used it to zero a disk before letting it leave the building, to benchmark io hardware by writing a certain number of bytes, to put a disk image on a floppy or usb drive, or even to back up an entire disk.