Tar with progress but without compression

There are a lot of answers on how to create a tar.gz file with progress updates (ie. this answer, copied below)

tar cf - /folder-with-big-files -P | pv -s $(du -sb /folder-with-big-files | awk '{print $1}') | gzip > big-files.tar.gz

But how do I see the progress if I am tarring files without compression like so

tar -cvf output.tar folder/to/tar

Solution 1:

While the accepted solution works it is just a bit of an abuse of process. There is a simpler and more elegant/correct solution -

tar -c /folder-with-big-files | pv -s $(du -sb /folder-with-big-files | awk '{print $1}') > bigfiles.tar

tar stands for Tape ARchive - and is designed to deal with streams. the "f" in "cf" tells tar to specifically create a file - rather then do this and specify a "-" to use stdout as this file.

Solution 2:

Instead of putting the output through gzip, output to a file: tar cf - /folder-with-big-files -P | pv -s $(du -sb /folder-with-big-files | awk '{print $1}') > big-files.tar