Pipe Viewer, a very useful tool

I recently came across the program PV aka Pipe Viewer, which I found very useful in figuring out how much of a file had been read during a large database insert. Here is the use case:

[root@zabbix dumps]# pv zabbix_data-history.sql | psql -U zabbix -W zabbix -c "COPY history (itemid, clock, value, ns) FROM stdin;"
Password for user zabbix:
98.6MiB 0:05:52 [ 292KiB/s] [==========>             ] 57% ETA 0:04:23

As you can see the import is going to take a while, before this I had no idea how far into the import Postgres actually was.

More information can be found here: http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml