TLC

tlc (Terminal Line Count) utility counts lines interactively on terminal. It allows you to view some command's progress without filling whole screen by extraneous details.

Written in C using modern POSIX and OpenBSD features. Build testing happens on OpenBSD, Linux, macOS and FreeBSD for now. Portability patches are welcome.

The code is distributed under BSD 2-clause license, except a few compatibility goo that uses older BSD 3-clause license.

Build and install instructions

Build and install on OpenBSD

The shortest way:

make && doas make install

You can also run regression tests after successful build:

make test

Build and install on non-OpenBSD

Non-BSD systems require https://libbsd.freedesktop.org/wiki/ being installed. Note that if you system has separate -dev packages, you'll need such one as well for building tlc not just libbsd itself.

Use CMake the usual way, for example:

mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake ..
make

To install you'll likely need elevate priviledges via sudo(8):

sudo make install

Usage examples

Show file removal progress:

$ rm -Rv foo | tlc
42...

and eventually the line above will evolve into:

1765
$

If you want to make things look prettier:

$ rm -Rv foo | tlc 'files removed'
42 files removed...
<...>
1765 files removed.
$

If you now how many lines there should be, you can even print progress:

$ rm -Rv foo | tlc -e 1000
176%
$

As you can see, 100% is not the real limit. :-)

You can customize the status line:

$ rm -Rv foo | tlc -e 1000 -f '[%p%] %i files removed, last one: %s'
[37%] 370 files removed, last one: foo/bar/buz
<...>
[176%] 1765 files removed, last one: foo
$

Now a bit more complex task: lets monitor progress of the following pipe:

find /usr/lib -type f -name '*.so' |
xargs -J % objdump -p % >plugins.log

We can use tee or tail -f magic filling our screen:

find /usr/local/lib -type f -name '*.so' |
tee /dev/stderr |
xargs -J % objdump -p % >plugins.log

This will help you to see the process is going on, but it won't be easy to see how many files were already handled. Lets use tlc instead:

$ find /usr/lib -type f -name '*.so' |
tlc -p |
xargs -J % objdump -p % >plugins.log

This (shorter!) command will display just status line like:

37...

until the end:

1337
$

For more details see the manual page, tlc(1).