Can I see the status of a "repair by sorting" in mysql? I am running an alter statement on a very large table.

show processlist shows the state as "Repair by sorting".

Is there a way to see the status, or get an estimate of how much work has been completed/remaining?

Thanks.
Repair by sorting is a phase that creates a temp table, populates a temp index file, and  prepares all indexes for the target. This would require being in the operating system to view the temp file's size as well as the data and time stamp.

If you ever need to see such progress, there are two things you can do


Migrate the DB to MySQL in Amazon EC2 where you can have OS level access
Migrate the DB to MariaDB in Amazon EC2 since MariaDB gives metered progress on DDL : See my post Is there a progress indicator for OPTIMIZE TABLE progress?


Other than these suggestions, there is nothing else you can do.