The commandline utility dd is a core tool which I use very often to achieve different things. Right now I’m writing an Raspberry Pi image to a SD card. The problem with dd is that it does not print any status information during runtime. And here comes the trap for young players: the trick using dd -USR1 [pid] does not print status information on Mac OS. It terminates dd!

Writing an image to an SD card on Mac OS is very simple assuming that you’ve opened the Terminal.app and stay in the directory where the image file is stored.

1. Run diskutil list to get a list of all storage devices connected to your computer. Get the device name like /dev/disk3 from the list - use the size of the device as identifying property.
2. Run diskutil unmountDisk [device name] to detach the device from the file system.
3. Use the command sudo dd if=[image filename] of=[device name] bs=1024 to write the image to the sd card. Be aware of the fact that this command overwrites all contents of the SD card. So make sure that you’ve selected the right device name.

Step three might now take some time. To let dd print the progress you simply need to know this command: sudo kill -SIGINFO [pid]. That’s all it is! Simply replace USR1 with SIGINFO and you’re back on track.

Tip: use ps ax | grep dd to get the PID of the dd process and don’t use the PID of the sudo process.

Tip 2: when your device is /dev/disk# use the command sudo dd if=[image filename] of=/dev/rdisk# bs=1024. This will enable a much higher transfer rate since you use the raw disk rdisk. A BSD thing you need to know.