PHP upload status function (upload progress bar)

We are PHP Users who signed this petition to address an issue in PHP. We hope the PHP Developers read this and take our plead into account.

Currently there's no way to check the status of a file upload. As of now, users have to wait, not knowing what is going on, and many simply cancel the upload operation since they think something has gone wrong.

We feel this to be an major missing feature, and urge the PHP-Dev team to implement a function that gives us the necessary info to build a progress bar or similar, since right now we have to evade this issue by either applying unofficial patches (see David Enderson's or Doru Theodor Petrescu's patch), which is not even possible on shared hosts, or by using ugly hacks (jumping from php to perl and back to php - see megaupload).

We feel such a function would greatly enhance usability on many web sites, and would be very grateful if said feature was added in PHP.