progress

progress inspects already-running local processes and estimates how far file-oriented commands have advanced by reading open-file positions. It is mainly used to watch copy, archive, compression, checksum, and transfer jobs that were started without their own progress display.

• See percent complete, bytes processed, throughput, and ETA for long-running local copy, move, archive, compression, checksum, or transfer-related jobs.
• Target one process or class of processes with -p, -c, -a, and -o instead of scanning every known command on the system.
• Keep a live terminal view while background file operations finish, or run a one-shot check to confirm a job is still moving.

• Useful in local inspect-and-verify loops because it can attach to an existing PID or command name without changing how the original job was started.
• Automation is limited by plain-text output only; no JSON mode or other stable machine-readable schema is implemented.
• Best as a sidecar for long-running shell jobs on the same host, not as a broader action CLI for managing files or services.

• Coverage depends on what the tool can infer from /proc, libproc, or procstat, so permissions and file-access patterns can hide or distort progress.
• Continuous monitor modes switch to an ncurses screen, which is convenient for humans but less convenient for unattended parsing.