Comments on: Watch – A Useful Linux Command You May Have Never Heard Of

By: Spyros

Spyros — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 07:48:25 +0000

Actually i have heard of the command but i must admit that i have really used it Nice post, though !

By: YB

YB — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:04:16 +0000

Thanks, Guy!
I was looking for a way to watch a certain part of a long output and your tailpipe solution was perfect!

By: Guy

Guy — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:59:59 +0000

Artem,
Just pipe it out to the tail function, try this:

watch -d 'ls -l /usr/bin | tail -n 50'

Works quite well. Now if it could only take an action when something changed, i.e., move files in a directory when we found changes to a directory.

By: Artem Russakovskii

Artem Russakovskii — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:14:38 +0000

Carlos, what I mean is, if you are trying to watch a long directory listing that doesn't fit the screen, screen would show you the top output of 'ls' for example, not the bottom.

By: Carlos from Philly

Carlos from Philly — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:54:58 +0000

Not sure what you mean by:
"Now if anyone knows how to make watch print the bottom part of the command output rather than the top, please post a comment."
But using the –no-title option eliminates the:
Every 5.0s: ls Thu Jul 24 09:53:45 2008
portion of the output, giving you only the result of the stuff in your quotes (at the specified interval and maintaining the specified options, of course).