ipfs get and ipfs cat progress information

[remmerw]

Version information:

All versions

Type:

• "feature": Json output of progress information for the commands ipfs get / ipfs cat

Description:

Would be nice when progress information which are reported by the commands ipfs get and ipfs cat are also be encoded in json (like other commands ipfs pubsub sub "--enc:json".
Background: Then it is easier to parse the progress. Now it is almost impossible.

[Stebalien]

The go-ipfs daemon doesn't actually return this information. However, we could fabricate it in the PostRun function when asked to encode to JSON.

[andrasfuchs]

Additionally to the original request, it would be great to have continuous feedback during the search phase of the get / cat commands. This information then could be shown in IPFS Desktop as suggested here: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-webui/issues/1088

If I try to get a random hash (like ipfs get QmWXShtJXt6Mw3FH7hVCQvR56xPcaEtSj4YFSGjp2QxA4o) , ipfs seemingly hangs for minutes. It would be nice to have some details displayed about the search progress.

I don't know the inner processes of get/cat, but I guess the daemon asks other nodes to look for the hash and they report it back if they found something. Could we display the amount of nodes working on the search at any given moment and their reported success or failure?