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I'm migrating my HDD to an external hard drive so that I can do a clean install of macOS Mojave.

I'm using dd if=/dev/disk02 of=/dev/disk15s2 to accomplish the task.
disk02 is the Macintosh HD (SATA-HDD), disk15s2 is the WD External HD

I didn't realize that it wouldn't show me any indication of progress (the HDD has ~750GB on it) - this is the first time I've done this through the terminal.app in recovery mode.

Is there a way for me to track the progress in another terminal window while it is in progress?

I'm on a Macbook Pro mid-2012 running El Capitan.

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  • If you run this again, you should set the block size. dd if=/dev/disk02 of=/dev/disk15s2 bs=1024m will greatly improve the speed.
    – historystamp
    Aug 28, 2019 at 4:50

1 Answer 1

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Yes, from a separate terminal you can issue this command:

kill -INFO 1234

where you need to replace 1234 with the pid of your dd process. You can look it up with the ps command.

Another simplification at a second terminal:

sudo kill -s siginfo $(pgrep ^dd)   # get dd info

Another simpler way is to request the progress information from the same terminal as dd by pressing Ctrl-T.

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  • 1
    Thank you, both of those work, Ctrl-T is definitely more effective
    – Alex
    Dec 1, 2018 at 23:11
  • I know his is the apple SE but it's one of the top results. on Linux it looks like there is no -INFO but at least GNU dd will respond to -USR1.
    – SilentVoid
    Oct 17, 2021 at 1:30
  • @SilentVoid On modern Linux you would normally start dd with the "status=progress" option, which gives you a nice progress bar.
    – jksoegaard
    Oct 17, 2021 at 8:56
  • @jksoegaard Right, but the question is what can you do if you've already started it and forgot or didn't know to put the progress option.
    – SilentVoid
    Nov 17, 2021 at 20:32

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