showing status with large file transfers via netcat/nc

I am using nc/netcat to transfer a large tar stream. Is there a way for either side to show some kind of status? Like how much has been transferred and/or the speed while it is transferring?

On the receiving end:

nc -l 9000 > data.tar

On the sending end:

tar cf - -C /path/to/data files | nc -N [target server] 9000

Answer

At its simplest, you could use pv – the pipe viewer:

tar cf - . | pv -b | nc -N [target server] 9000

If you look in the man-page, you can see how to “guesstimate” the size of the tar-file which potentially allows pv to calculate an estimated time of arrival.