curl features an alternative progress bar. When you invoke it with -# or the longer version –progress-bar, curl will show the transfer progress using a single “bar” on the screen instead of the default meter that shows a lot of data like amount of data, transfer speeds and times.

$ curl -# -O https://example.com/coolfile.tar.gz ############################################ 100.0%

The alternative progress bar works great when the amount of data to transfer is known since then it can actually know how large part of the transfer that is done etc. If the amount of data is unknown – which is not a super rare situation – the progress bar output instead used to output one ‘#’ per kilobyte of data so that it would still show something. That could then end up filling up the screen and more if you did a large transfer.

$ curl -# -O https://example.com/nosize.html ###########################################################################################################

The space ship bar

Starting in curl 7.58.0 (to be released on January 24, 2018), this latter progress bar layout is modified. If the total size is unknown, it will now instead display a small space ship flying across the line, back and forth – and it will only move as long as there is data being transferred. If it stalls, the little ship stops.

“Over” the space ship there are four nonsensical flying hashes (‘#’) that are simply moving across the line on a sine wave, following each other. They move independently of there being data transferred or not.

It can then end up looking similar to this:

Pointless

There’s no real “meaning” behind this new progress bar output mode. I wanted it to

only use a single line, even in the no-total size known case somehow indicate when there’s no data flying (ie space ship stops) make it slightly more interesting to watch than just one # per kilobyte

Since this new bar has just landed and this is the first time we ship a release with it, I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up polishing it further later on.

Can you tell I started out my programming life as a demo programmer on the Commodore 64? 🙂