BRU normally does its work silently, returning control to the calling interface (the user terminal, or the spawning process) once it has completed its task. However, if you want to monitor what BRU is doing, a verbosity-level selection option is accessible from the command line. Verbosity is specified by the -v (lower case) and -V (upper case) options. The verbosity options provide five levels of verbosity and a summary mode: -v, -vv, -vvv, -vvvv, -vvvvv, and -V, where a single v represents the lowest and five v’s the highest verbosity level. Using -V produces an execution summary without the volume of output generated by the other verbose options. The following example shows how the verbosity option is used with the estimate mode:
$ cd /
$ bru -e -vv ./bin/a*
e 2k of 4k [1] ./
e 2k of 6k [1] ./bin
e 72k of 78k [1] ./bin/acctcom
e 68k of 146k [1] ./bin/adb
The first field in the output contains the mode character, as a reminder of what mode is currently running (in this case the “e”, or “estimate” mode). The next field gives the amount of space in kilobytes that this particular file will use in the archive. The next field (“of XXXk”) gives a running total of the amount of data in the archive, including the current file. The number inside the square brackets is the current volume number. Finally, the name of the file is listed.