cv: The coreutils viewer

The other C-program I have today is a coreutils viewer, appearing as cv on Github. No, just for the record, I don’t dredge Github looking for new material. As it would happen, most titles these days are submitted from readers, and thrown into the hat.

This one was relayed to me by e-mail, and I realized later that I actually had it on my list as coreutils-viewer, so it’s possible I copied that name from elsewhere on the Internet. Regardless. …

Some other tools to amplify the output of core utilities — like pv or Advanced Copy — attempt to integrate themselves into the command, or pipe through it. cv, as you can see above, takes the sidelong approach by checking for running instances of dd, cp, mv, grep and a bunch of others, and showing their progress as a summary.

It’s an interesting solution to the long-standing issue of less-than-communicative programs, like cp. And goodness knows those have bothered me for quite some time.

cv has a few options to keep you busy; it has a monitor mode with -m, that will loop until processes finish, and another monitor mode with -M which will loop indefinitely, allowing you to keep it on screen as a kind of coreutils process monitor. I like that.

And there is a filter option with -c that lets you trim the display to only one particular process. Not much more than that, but simple is best. 😉

I think I shall keep cv on board for a little while longer. I like the idea of having a continuous monitor of coreutils processes, even if I am quickly approaching a system made up completely of monitors, and nothing actually doing any work. 🙄