Pipemeter - Why wasn't this written before? - DOWNLOAD.[tarballs, debs, and rpms available in download area]

News
7/20/2007v1.1.3 Released Major bugfix for FreeBSD, minor bugfix for older compilers. Oops, I forgot to update the changelog timestamp. I should automate that. I'd like to appologize to anyone who hasn't been able to get email to me. I'm not sure whats going on, but I assure you, I read emails about pipemeter with much enthusiasm.. so don't hesitate to contact me. pipemeter-1.1.3.tar.gz pipemeter-1.1.3.tar.gz.asc--Signature
6/8/2006v1.1.2 Released Adding support for reading a list of files, and a more traditional way to specify input files without the -f argument. pipemeter-1.1.2.tar.gz pipemeter-1.1.2.tar.gz.asc--Signature
6/2/2006v1.1.1 Released Oops! Some testing got skipped. Reading from stdin was broken in 1.1.0. Recommended to go right to v1.1.1. pipemeter-1.1.1.tar.gz pipemeter-1.1.1.tar.gz.asc--Signature
6/1/2006v1.1.0 Released New feature in this one. -f can now be specified multiple times, and it will read all of the specified files in the order they are specified on the cmdline. pipemeter-1.1.0.tar.gz pipemeter-1.1.0.tar.gz.asc--Signature
1/30/2006v1.0.1 Released Well after well over a year of bug free existence, 1.0.0 finally showed a need for some cleanup. I discovered a problem with very large numbers being passed to the --size/-s argument, and also found that I wasn't quite using all of the tools autoconf had for me. pipemeter-1.0.1.tar.gz pipemeter-1.0.1.tar.gz.asc--Signature
09/11/2004v1.0.0 Released Random fixes and code cleanups, but more importantly, I feel that this is the end of the line for the first generation code. Its time to move on and create 2.0. I plan to base it on one of my new projects, mpbz2 Note that for rpm based systems, the rpms built for i386 should work on any version of redhat, and probably other distros too. pipemeter-1.0.0.tar.gz pipemeter-1.0.0.tar.gz.asc--Signature
06/02/2004v0.9.3 Released pipemeter v0.9.3 has been released. This is a pretty minor upgrade consisting of long command line options mostly. The man page has also been spruced up some. Note that for rpm based systems, the rpms built for i386 should work on any version of redhat, and probably other distros too. pipemeter-0.9.3.tar.gz pipemeter-0.9.3.tar.gz.asc--Signature
04/08/2004 .spec file fixed Call me lazy, but I don't want to make a whole release just for a b0rked spec file. Below is a link to a tarball with a fixed spec file so it will build on rpm4 based systems. The Lazy part isn't that I didn't do the release, its that I forgot to put this note up here for almost a month. ;) pipemeter-0.9.2-1_specfilefixed_.tar.gz
03/17/2004 Pipemeter v0.9.2 Released Another day, another point release. Fixed some nagging things, and added cool stuff to display the elapsed time and make adaptive block sizing a little smarter. Thanks to Ed Avis for submitting a patch to fix a few errno and EINTR handling bugs. pipemeter-0.9.2.tar.gz pipemeter-0.9.2.tar.gz.asc--Signature
02/26/2004 Pipemeter included in Arch Linux I was just informed today that Pipemeter is now included in Arch Linux's extras. Thanks to Demir Perisa for adding it!
02/08/2004 Pipemeter v0.9.1 Released Pipemeter v0.9.1 fixes some bugs in v0.9. It is recommended that everyone upgrade to it now. pipemeter-0.9.1.tar.gz pipemeter-0.9.1.tar.gz.asc--Signature Note: the text saying that rpm building works is wrong. The spec in 0.9.2 will work (its not in CVS yet.. but will be soon.
02/06/2004 Pipemeter v0.9 Released Pipemeter v0.9 adds an ETA display to the percentage display, something I've wanted for quite some time. It also adds "logging mode", which will get better in the future, but for now just makes pipemeter use newlines instead of carriage returns, so you don't lose any of its output.
01/06/2004 Mailing lists, RPMs Two new mailing lists have been setup for use by pipemeter enthusiasts. Update August 2007:Unfortunately, these mailing lists were lost in a server move and are no longer operational. pipemeter - General discussion. pipemeter-announce - Announcements. Also, Taylor Kimball from LinuxHQ has sent me some RPMs, which are available now in the download area. Thanks Taylor!
01/04/2004 Pipemeter v0.8.4 Released Ok, I finally got some time to work on pipemeter despite an ear infection and stomach flu. I believe that this fixes largefile support across all platforms, and does it the right way by using a mixture of off_t and autoconf. ;) This also fixes a misbehavior that caused it to report very low rates on the last report before exiting. It now divides the number of bytes that went through it, by the time it ran.
01/01/2004 Firewall was blocking CVS access. Damnit! The firewall here was improperly configured, and upon reboot a few weeks ago anonymous cvs access was accidently blocked. It is open again now. :-/
12/20/2003 Pipemeter available in FreeBSD ports! Oi, I forgot to mention this here. Pipemeter is now available in the FreeBSD ports collection. Thanks to my former colleague Len Sassaman for maintaining that port. Also I have setup an apt source for Debian users. Add this line to your sources.list: deb http://xntech.net/debian/ stable xntech (Note, the packages are setup for stable, but they work fine on testing and unstable as well).
12/18/2003 Largefile bug with -f found - Fix soon Ugh, I found an annoying bug with large files and using the -f flag today. A fix is forthcoming, but with the holidays it may be a few weeks.
10/23/2003 Anonymous CVS access finally works! I don't know why I took so long to do this. Anonymous CVS read-only access works now. See below for more info.
10/22/2003 v0.8.3 Released, bugfixes and autoconf! v0.8.3 fixes a bug that prevented pipemeter from working on some platforms. Also, v0.8.2 was released without any real notification to the world. It switches the build system to autoconf. Woohoo, almost makes pipemeter look legit!
10/22/2003 New platforms! FreeBSD and Solaris are tested and working! After making the fix in 0.8.3, I tried out pipemeter on FreeBSD (4.8-STABLE and 5.1-RELEASE), and Solaris 2.7 and 2.8. All four platforms performed quite admirably. Unfortunately, testscript.sh relies on GNU dd, so we'll have to wait for performance comparisons.

About

Ok, so I've been talking about writing this program for a while. Well I did. Its called pipemeter, and with the help of my buddy Urchlay(B. Watson), it has materialized into something quite nice. You can grab the latest version here. My good friend Len Sassaman noted that I should be signing the source code for pipemeter. So, in the same directory you can find a PGP signature of the latest release.

Please note that there is always a .deb of the latest version available in that dir. I create these debs on a Debian stable (Sarge at this time) machine, so anyone out there should be able to use them just fine.

The response has been great. I've gotten quite a few emails about pipemeter's usefulness.

Great Minds Think Alike I guess. In mid-2002, another person got the same idea for pipemeter. They named it 'pv' for "PipeViewer". See it here. It has some functionality that pipemeter does not at the moment. I will say, however, that it also uses more CPU, which does not meet with the design goals I have for pipemeter. Maybe some day we can collaborate and share code.

Pipemeter is included with the following Operating Systems:

KRUD Linux	http://www.tummy.com/krud/
PLD-Linux	http://www.pld.org.pl/
FreeBSD Ports	http://www.freebsd.org/
Arch Linux	http://www.archlinux.org/

Pipemeter is developed using Subversion.

Anonymous svn access

Features:

• Shows speed of data moving from input to output.
• Shows percentage complete if regular file specified.
• Allows tuning of block size and display interval
• Support for dd style block size specification

Upcoming Features:

• Adjust for terminal width (Thanks to Ross Ulrich)
• Replacement commands for cp, dd, tar, etc.
• Seperate ncurses interface for more interactive fun (not happening soon).

Thanks

• Brian Watson
• Ian McMahon
• The GNU Project
• Helpful users

• mbuffer m(easuring) buffer. This is an enhancement to a standard program called buffer. This program does most of what pipemeter does, and some things it doesn't.
• pmr Heikki Orsila's program that is similar to pipemeter, and actually used to be named pipemeter as well. Thanks to Heikki for being a gentleman and changing the name.
• Pipe Viewer Pipe Viewer is a program that, oddly enough, was created around the same time as pipemeter. It has always had more features than pipemeter, and subsequently, is a bit larger. I really like the multi-line features though.

File last modified September 1 2007 09:42:12 AM PDT
Copyright Clint Byrum, 2007. All Rights Reserved.
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