progress - Coreutils Progress Viewer 
What is it?
This tool can be described as a Tiny, Dirty, Linux-and-OSX-Only C command
that looks for coreutils basic commands (cp, mv, dd, tar, gzip/gunzip,
cat, etc.) currently running on your system and displays the
percentage of copied data. It can also show estimated time and throughput,
and provides a "top-like" mode (monitoring).
(After many requests: the colors in the shell come from powerline-shell. Try it, it's cool.)
Formerly known as cv (Coreutils Viewer).
How do you build it?
make && make install
It depends on library ncurses, you may have to install corresponding packages (may be something like 'libncurses5-dev' or 'ncurses-devel').
How do you run it?
Just launch the binary, progress.
What can I do with it?
A few examples. You can:
-
monitor all current and upcoming instances of coreutils commands in
a simple window:watch progress -q -
see how your download is progressing:
watch progress -wc firefox -
look at your Web server activity:
progress -c httpd -
launch and monitor any heavy command using
$!:cp bigfile newfile & progress -mp $!
and much more.
How does it work?
It simply scans /proc for interesting commands, and then looks at
directories fd and fdinfo to find opened files and seek positions,
and reports status for the largest file.
It's very light, and compatible with virtually any command.