If you do not know what Pipe Viewer is (I did not know about it until 5 minutes ago), then this blog does a good job giving a brief introduction to it with some examples. I write a lot of Perl Scripts as an ETL developer and a lot of times, the files that I work with take really long time to operate with (unzipping, moving, etc). Therefore, this tool would be awesome except I work in a Windows Environment. If anyone knows of a tool that gives you Progress of an operation running in the pipeline, please let me know as that would make my scripts that much more useful.
I doubt such a tool exists for win32, but it should run on cygwin. But then again You probably don't use it :)