Today I had to run one fsck on a large RAID array ~ 6TB. In the speed I did not start fsck with the -C option to show me progress and after a modest wait from 2 hours I'm a little tired, that I am unaware of how far the inspection has come. A cool trick for an already launched fsck to visualize the progress bar is:

kill -10 $(pidof fsck.ext3)

You wait a while with me after about 2-3 min a progress bar appeared and showed 49% (kef) more 3 hours of waiting 🙁

Let's summarize what we do we send a signal SIGUSR1 which prompts the fsck to show the progress bar. If we want to stop it for some reason, we have to send it SIGUSR2 or

kill -12 $(pidof fsck.ext3)

Well this is not something super complicated or difficult just a cool trick 🙂