Give your bash job a progress bar
It’s always nice to get notified about the status of a long job, e.g. copying a huge file via a not-that-fast network. For GUI programs, normally you get a progress bar, but we have no such luxury under bash. But wait, here is a nice bash script can do that. It works pretty well. You will find it useful in many places.
http://www.theiling.de/projects/bar.html