Bash Progress Bar Utility

A simple, reusable progress bar library for Bash scripts.
It lets you display a clean progress indicator at the bottom of your terminal while running loops, tasks, or file processing.

Features

• Easy to include in any script with source progressbar.sh
• Displays progress as a colored bar at the bottom of the terminal
• Works with custom totals and current progress values
• No dependencies (pure Bash + ANSI escape sequences)
• Configurable bar characters and colors

Installation

Just copy progressbar.sh somewhere accessible, then include it in your scripts:

source /path/to/progressbar.sh

Usage

#!/usr/bin/env bash
source ./progressbar.sh

local total=20
pb_init  # Initialize progress bar

for ((i = 1; i <= total; i++)); do
	pb_update "$i" "$total" # Update progress bar
    sleep 0.1
done

Output

Progress: [50%] [####################....................]

API

pb_init

Initializes the progress bar.
Call this once before starting updates.

pb_destroy (optional)

Destroys the progress bar and restores the terminal to its normal state.
Normally, this is called automatically at the end of your script.
You can call it manually if you want to stop displaying the progress bar before your script finishes.

pb_update

Updates the progress bar.
The bar will refresh in-place at the bottom of the terminal.

current → current step or item number
total → total number of steps/items

Configuration

You can customize the bar characters by setting these variables before calling pb_update:

PB_PREFIX='Progress: '
PB_START_CHAR='['
PB_BAR_CHAR="#"
PB_EMPTY_CHAR="."
PB_END_CHAR=']'

Notes

Designed for Linux/macOS terminals with ANSI support

License

MIT — free to use, modify, and distribute.