CLI should report progress

[thedrow]

This is especially important for compressing or decompressing bigger files.

[eustas]

That is a slippery feature:

• not for every input it is possible to know its length; for file system it is almost certainly possible, but if someone appends to file being compressed some nasty behavior might occur
  • there is no nice and platform-independent way to show progress in console
  • one method is to draw scale first and then add "ticks" below, as processing is progressing; but this way 2 lines of output are used for progress bar + 1 for final results; also it depends on available width of console
  • the other way is to rewrite output via \r; that is less portable, as it requires terminal to support this; and again, the width of console comes in play... and it might change over time, you know...

Could you point to the program whose progress report you liked the best, please?

[thedrow]

zstd's CLI does the trick just fine.

[Absolucy]

It's really annoying attempting to compress a decently sized file, and having no indicator whatsoever of progress. No clue if it's going to take 2 minutes or 5 hours.

[Arnie97]

br() {
    for file in "$@"; do
        pv -N "$file" "$file" | brotli -vo "$file.br"
    done
}

[eustas]

TIL! Cool utility.

Also going to take a look at zstd way of doing things, when I get spare cycles.