resolution of status display in create - make MB visible

[nealpalmer]

Feature enhancement request:

During "create" the current amount of data processed is shown - wonderful!
1.59 TB O 1.57 TB C 41.96 MB D 362508 N mnts_to_backup/oct/some_filename.bin

But as the amount of data gets very large, the information update becomes fairly unuseable. I.E. when the data size gets to be 5TB, the number shown is "5.00 TB". Can you please make a change so that significant digits of MB are always displayed? That would change the output to "5.000000 TB", that way a glance at the changing number could tell you how fast it is currently running, and if it is making progress (instead of having to wait for a full 10GB of data to be transferred before seeing a size change).

This would change the output to be in one of the following formats:
#.## MB
#.### GB
#.###### TB
#.######### PB

[ThomasWaldmann]

Well, you can see the speed very well at the beginning, before it gets into the TB range.
You also can often see that it does make progress (at all), because N is increasing (exception: very large files, when N only increases infrequently).

If we would output more digits, the space left to show the file path would shrink (esp. a problem if width is only 80 chars total).

The only good option I see right now is to increase digits IFF the screen width is >> 80.
Not sure if that is easy enough to do.

[enkore]

iotop(8)

[nealpalmer]

I run it from a cron job, and occasionally want to see that it is making progress, especially on a long backup run. I generally won't see the beginning of it.