Previously I have mentioned an awesome little command-line tool called ‘pv’. Recently, I was trying to restore a clients of legacy database on my development machine, which was a staggering 30GB .sql file. I was having quite a few problems trying to wrestle this beast, the worst of which being that I had no idea how much longer the import would take, or if it had locked up. Luckily, PV comes to the rescue.

Normally, when importing a MySQL dump file, you can just type:

mysql -uxxx -pxxx dbname < /sqlfile.sql

…to import directly from the file. However, you can pv the file and pipe it into the mysql executable like:

pv sqlfile.sql | mysql -uxxx -pxxxx dbname

And you will get an awesome progress bar about how completed the task is. You can also use it in the reverse. You’d be surprised how useful it can be.