Progress bars in Python with tqdm

I ran a script which processed a large chunk of data, but was not sure what percentage of data has been processed and thought it would be nicer to have a progress bar, adding which was much simpler than I thought using tqdm.

In order to access the python library, we need to install it in the python environment, using:

pip install tqdm

Import package into the script:

from tqdm import tqdm

And just add the progress bar to your loop:

for i in tqdm(range(100)):
    pass

To modify the progress bar:

for i in tqdm(range(100), ascii=True):
    pass

Add description:

for i in tqdm(range(100), ascii=True, desc="bar"):
    pass

Control width:

for i in tqdm(range(100), ncols=99):
    pass

Modify color:

for i in tqdm(range(100), colour="green"):
    pass

You can also use a more optimised version of tqdm(range) i.e trange:

for i in trange(100):
    pass

tqdm can also be used as pipes:

seq 9999999 | wc -l | tqdm

Let’s create a test directory with arbitrary large number of files:

mkdir -p test; touch sample{0001..9999}.txt

tar -zcf - test/ | tqdm --bytes --total `du -s test/ | cut -f1` > test.tgz

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