ee is a frontend of dd utility, it’s written in Python and runs like:


$ ee if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null count=1024 bs=5M
4.94GB/5.00GB (99%) transferred in 3.45 seconds (1.50GB/sec)

Like the post title say, it’s like dd + pv - bar, where bar is progress bar. pv is Pipe Viewer and there is another called bar.


$ dd if=/dev/zero count=1024 bs=5M | pv -s 50120M >/dev/null
2.54GiB 0:00:05 [ 574MiB/s] [>                 ]  5% ETA 0:01:31

I think there still is a place for ee, even pv and bar are more generalized program to display current progress. And you could clearly see, there is performance penalty of using pv (v1.5.2), from 1.5 GB/s to just 575 MiB/s.

If you even pipe out ... | pv | dd of=/dev/null, then the throughput would drop dramatically down to just 8 MiB/s on my computer.

So, clearly ee does a good job here even it doesn’t have a progress bar or ETA.