I have some 500 files of 650MB each, named bigfile.000 to bigfile.199 and I need to calculate the MD5 checksum of all files combined. The command I am using is:
cat bigfile.* | md5sum
I have the time, and I understand it will take hours to complete, but I still want to check the progress. Is there any way to do so? Like piping something in between and do a word count that doesn't affect performance much?