# Hello again! Long time no see. ;)

So... as I'm not able to use my dedicated desktop computer while we are relocated to the next-door apartment that is too tiny to set up any comfortable space for a workstation, I've been using my laptop instead.

Today I decided to upgrade the Linux on my laptop to the latest KDE Neon has to offer, I came upon a problem, and that is that my harddrive has some consistency issues with files. I decided to run the btrfs balancing tool `btrfs fi balance /home`.

It's a peculiar one, since it doesn't give out any output. So at first I used the `dmesg -w` command to see what it is doing, but found out a btrfs command for a progress report: `btrfs balance status /home` that gives out a static progress report like this:

    root@trabant:~# btrfs balance status /home
    Balance on '/home' is running
    138 out of about 180 chunks balanced (178 considered),   37% left

The only problem was that I needed to repeat that command every time I wanted to see the progress, and I wanted to see it in real-time.

The solution is a simple one: a `while` loop. :) Like this:

    while sleep 5; do (btrfs balance status /home&) ; done

And I got a page full of status reports.

I wanted to do better, so I added `clear` to the beginning of the line.

    while sleep 5; do (clear && btrfs balance status /home&) ; done

Result:

<center>![Screenshot_20190321_150853.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmdrRzix8pwmQMVzCgsYBtdFnSarJJBnwfVo51S6Swu3r4/Screenshot_20190321_150853.png)<br /><sup>*Now the progress report updates cleanly in the top of the window.*</sup></center>

Neat, huh? :)

If I come up with other nice tips, I'll be sure to post them here. :)

See ya!