A few releases ago scp displayed a visual approximation of its progress. I liked that feature and decided to reintroduce it (with a slightly different, wget-like, appearance). Extra bonus: this code behaves better on extremely narrow terminals than the original (see the patch: the branch with strlcpy(buf, "\r", win_size) is responsible for the improvement).
Created attachment 692 [details] the patch
I'd rather not see it back in. The issue we had in the past was to have a visual gauge we had to hack off too much of where the file was being saved. And I'd rather see as full as path as possible over the visual bar.
My implementation is very sophisticated: 1. the gauge is displayed only if the terminal is at least 68 chars wide (35 for numbers, 13 for minimal gauge (*), 20 for filename), this makes at least 32 chars for the filename on a standard 80-chars-wide terminal 2. the gauge grows beyond its minimal length if and only if there is some free space available 3. the gauge is hidden (and the space occupied by the gauge may be reused by the filename) when the file is finished (100%) (*) a space, two brackets and ten "indicators"
Created attachment 836 [details] a better patch Just in case anyone is interested in this enhancement, here is a better patch fixing a small aesthetical error.
We will be keeping the existing progress meter. Anyone who finds our too boring is welcome to use your patch :)
Mass update RESOLVED->CLOSED after release of openssh-5.1