Easy Mnemonic for All Useful Transfer Information

Command Line Aspect	Visual Mnemonic Graft
-beta

where:

• -b will make pv show the number of bytes already transferred,
• -e will show the estimated time of completion for the transfer,
• -t will show the elapsed time,
• -a will show the average data transfer rate

One example invocation of the command would be:

pv -beta < /dev/ablk > /dev/bblk

where:

• -beta are the command-line arguments and,
• /dev/ablk respectively /dev/bblk are block devices

such that the command will transfer all bytes from /dev/ablk onto the block device /dev/bblk.