Run SCP in background and monitor the progress

Question

I'm running an scp command in the background:

 nohup scp file.gz root@target-host:/root/ > nohup.out 2>&1

I entered the password - I hit ctrl-z to halt the command and restarted it with bg, and I can confirm that it's running by executing jobs. However, is there a way of monitoring the progress of the file transfer (i.e. if I would be running it without placing it in the background)?

Thank you.

Answer 1

You could use screen(1) or similar, instead of bg.

Then you can control-ad to detach and screen -d -r to reattach.

You can also log out and back in as needed, without losing the ability to reattach, so it's great over unreliable networks. It dates back to when people were doing Slip and PPP over modems, and before.

Answer 2

While running CentOS / Red Hat / Fedora, I simply use:

ps aux | grep scp

to check on the running scp processes. To see if they are doing anything, I like to use:

du -s -c -h *

If you are on AWS EC2, you can switch to the section Instances to monitor network and r/w operations on the boot volume. To see what additional drives are doing, switch to the Monitoring tab in the Volumes section and select a volume.