As I was trying to write an ISO to a USB drive, I wanted to see the progress when using the ‘dd’ command line tool. I found a quick pointer on StackOverflow to use the ‘pv’ command, so I adapted a little to use on a Mac. This will also serve as a guide on how to write ISOs on Mac. Here’s how:
- Install pv with homebrew:
brew install pv - Find your USB drive with
diskutil list. Should be pretty easy to spot the USB drive as it will be smaller than the other disks. Tread lightly though, don’t mess with your hard drive. I’ll use /dev/disk3, as that’s what my command returned. - Unmount it with
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk3. - Become root with
sudo su - Write your iso with this general layout, substituting paths where necessary:
dd if=/path/to/your.iso | pv | dd of=/dev/disk3 bs=1024k.