Is it possible to display the progress of a sort in linux?
bash, linux, sorting
Solution
No, GNU `sort` does not do progress reporting.
However, if are you using `sort` just to remove duplicates, and you don't actually care about the ordering, then there's a more scalable way of doing that:
awk '! a[$0]++'
This writes out the first occurrence of a line as soon as it's been seen, which can give you an idea of the progress.
Problem
My job involves a lot of sorting fields from very large files. I usually do this with the `sort` command in bash. Unfortunately, when I start a sort I am never really sure how long it is going to take. Should I wait a second for the results to appear, or should I start working on something else while it runs? Is there any possible way to get an idea of how far along a sort has progressed or how fast it is working? ``` $ cut -d , -f 3 VERY_BIG_FILE | sort -du > output ```