Monitoring awk script progress

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Is there a way to have awk output its regular output to a file and some other stuff to a log file to monitor progress?

ie: print first field of a file and for every 100000 lines dealt with, print time in file.log

2 
awk ' { print $0    
        if(FNR % 1000000 ==0 ) {printf ("processed %d lines", FNR) > "./file.log"  } } ' inputfilename
3

here's something I've been using for quite some time for 'large' files to entertain a user:
nawk -f myAWK.awk myFile
OR
nawk -v twirle="${USER}" -f myAWK.awk myFile
OR
nawk -v twirle='str' -f myAWK.awk myFile

myAWK.awk:

#!/usr/bin/nawk -f
#
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
function makeTwirleS(twirle, sep,     s,twLength,twSlength,i,left,l,r,right,arrN ,arr)
{

    s=twirle
    twLength=length(twirle)
    twSlength=length(twirle) * ((length(twirle) <= 3) ? 5 : 2)

    for(right=twLength+1; right<=twSlength; right++)
       s=s "."

    # left -> right
    for(i=1; i+twLength<=twSlength; i++) {
      l=r=""
      for(left=1; left<=i; left++)
         l=(l=="")? "." : l "."
      for(right=i+twLength+1; right<=twSlength; right++)
         r=(r=="")? "." : r "."
      s=s sep l twirle r
    }

    # reverse the direction - right -> left
    arrN=split(s, arr, sep)
    for(i=arrN-1; i>1; i--)
       s=s sep arr

    return s
}
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------

BEGIN {

# Progress bar
  PROGRESSdiv=1000
  if (!twirle) twirle="*"
  # deal with the TWIRLE
  twirleS=makeTwirleS(twirle, SUBSEP)
  ntwirleA=split(twirleS, twirleA, SUBSEP)

  stderr="cat 1>&2"

}
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------

!( FNR % PROGRESSdiv) {
     printf("\rProgress [%s]-> [%d] lines [%s]", FILENAME, FNR, twirleA[(++_twirle % ntwirleA+1)])  | stderr;
}
#
# here goes the rest of the awk script......
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------