.\" Copyright (c) 2001 Sam Holden
.\" All rights reserved.
.TH rate 1 "7 July 2002"
.SH NAME
rate \- passes data from stdin to stdout outputing status information on stderr.
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B rate
.B [-b blocksize]
.B [-o output size]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B rate

Simple passes data from stdin to stdout while outputting status information on
stderr.

The status information is of the form X Y (Z) where X is the number of bytes
passed through so far, Y is the average transfer rate, and Z is the transfer
rate of the 'output size' chunk most recently processed.

This exists because I use "dd | nc" and "nc | dd" to transfer disk image chunks
between PCs in preperation for games nights. It's annoying not to be able to see
how far the transfer is, so now I can by using "dd | rate | nc" and
"nc | rate | dd".

.SH OPTIONS
.B -b blocksize
Specifies the size of the buffer used to store reads from stdin before writing
to stdout. Is the size of the read(2) call the result of which is then written
to stdout using multuple write(2) calls if necessary. Defaults to 8192
bytes.

.B -o output size
Specifies the number of bytes to read between making status outputs to stdout
(note, that more bytes may actually be read due to the relative sizes of blocksize
and output size as well the amount of data actually read by each read call).
Defaults to 10 times the blocksize.

.SH BUGS
I'm sure there are many, but I haven't come across them yet.