It's also a quick and dirty tool for wiping out partition headers on a disk.
status=LEVEL
The LEVEL of information to print to stderr; 'none'
suppresses everything but error messages, 'noxfer'
suppresses the final transfer statistics, 'progress' shows
periodic transfer statistics
and pv pv - monitor the progress of data through a pipe
So with pv, you can do something like dd if=/dev/zero count=2 bs=512 | pv | dd of=/dev/null
to visualize your dd progress.