Progress bars in Python with tqdm

Yugal Arora
2 min readOct 21, 2021

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I ran a script which processed a large chunk of data, but was not sure what percentage of data has been processed and thought it would be nicer to have a progress bar, adding which was much simpler than I thought using tqdm.

In order to access the python library, we need to install it in the python environment, using:

pip install tqdm

Import package into the script:

from tqdm import tqdm

And just add the progress bar to your loop:

for i in tdqm(range(100)):
pass

To modify the progress bar:

for i in tqdm(range(100), ascii = True):
pass

Add description:

for i in tqdm(range(100), ascii = True, desc="bar"):
pass

Control width:

for i in tqdm(range(100), ncols=99):
pass

Modify color:

for i in tqdm(range(100), colour=green):
pass

You can also use a more optimised version of tqdm(range) i.e trange:

for i in trange(100):
pass

tqdm can also be used as pipes:

seq 9999999 | wc -l | tqdm

Let’s create a test directory with arbitrary large number of files:

mkdir -p test;touch sample{0001..9999}.txttar -zcf - test/ | tqdm --bytes --total `du -s test/ | cut -f1` > test.tgz

Thanks for Reading !

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Yugal Arora
Yugal Arora

Written by Yugal Arora

Site Reliability Developer @ Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

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