Progress indicator from dd

Yes, you can get a progress indicator from dd.  Here’s the relevant section from the GNU dd manpage:

Sending a USR1 signal to a running `dd’  process  makes  it  print  I/O
statistics to standard error and then resume copying.

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null& pid=$!
$ kill -USR1 $pid; sleep 1; kill $pid

18335302+0  records  in  18335302+0 records out 9387674624 bytes
(9.4 GB) copied, 34.6279 seconds, 271 MB/s