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Comment by baiitsu | Hacker News Reader

Using pv:

  gcp() {
    cat "$1" | pv | cat > "$2"
  }

useless use of cat

    pv < "$1" > "$2"

pv reads content from a file by default, so that can actually be reduced further to:

    pv "$1" > "$2"

Which will actually give better results this way, since it'll read the size of the file and use that to provide an estimate even.

Even if the cat at the beginning of a pipe isn't strictly necessary, it still helps readability to have everything flowing from left to right.

I also advocate this "useless" use of cat, but you can write the redirection before the command:

    <"$1" pv >"$2"

The bigger problem is that using cat destroys the file size information.