Monitor network traffic or speed/progress of a file transfer. The program can be used for cases like: how long it will take for my 38MB transfer to finish, how quickly is another transfer going, How fast is the upstream on this ADSL line and how fast can I write data to my filesystem.

[ http://excess.org/speedometer/ ]

To display total bytes recieved in a network interface: speedometer -rx <interface_name> (ie, eth0)

To display total bytes tranmission: speedometer -tx <interface>

To get output in plaintext format: speedometer -rx <interface> -p

To observer any significant changes in your bar graph your network interface has to be actively recieving/uploading file. For this example I was downloading an ISO image.