How can I tell if "badblocks" is still working?

Question

I started "badblocks" without any options on my 1 TB external harddisk as below:

>> sudo badblocks /dev/sdb

Its been running for the past three days, and all what I can see is a long column of numbers on my terminal (As below):

...
457970423
458749684
458749685
458749686
458749687
495098888
495098889
495098890
495098891

Now it's been stuck (no change) on 495098891 (which may be a bad sector or something...) My question is, How can I tell if it is still working ? or maybe it's stuck somewhere... and is it safe to stop it (Ctrl-C) ??? or it might damage my external ???

Thank you.

Answer 1

I ended up using iotop which shows a nice detailed table, showing that there is read activity on the disk... therefore, I am sure the application is not stuck, and I will wait longer.

>> sudo iotop