Terminal : How to copy files showing progress

While copying large amounts of files (lots of photos) I used to use Finder in the macOS. Good ol’ drag-n-drop

Usually it is reliable, but lately I’m facing some problems when copying files to external disk.

Finder itself would become unresponsive.

So I decided to use terminal instead.

It worked (kinda) but it took 51 minutes to finish the copy (There were a lot of files)

and as you know traditionally cp does not show progress.

That is when I discovered rsync I had used it a long time ago decades ago, but never for local file copy.

I always used it as it was originally meant to be used ¹ to copy files to and from another machine.

Turns out using it for local file transfers is a good option especially since it has --progress option.

The command I used :

rsync -vhz --progress /path/to/source-dir/* /path/to/destination-dir

• v : Verbose
• z : Compression
• h : Human readable
• progress : Duh!