Watch – A Useful Linux Command You May Have Never Heard Of
Updated: November 9th, 2007
How many times did I want to watch a directory waiting for a file to appear in it? Constant ls, for example, quickly got boring. A quick Perl script that would reload ls every 5 seconds… yeah it works but it takes a while to type up, and often enough I'm too lazy for that. And then I found 'watch' – a utility that comes with most *nix distros. Look at this beauty [man watch]:
NAME
watch – execute a program periodically, showing output fullscreen
SYNOPSIS
watch [-dhvt] [-n ] [–differences[=cumulative]] [–help]
[–interval=] [–no-title] [–version]
DESCRIPTION
watch runs command repeatedly, displaying its output (the first screen
full). This allows you to watch the program output change over time.
By default, …
beer planet is a blog about technology, programming, computers, and geek life. It is run by Artem Russakovskii - a local San Francisco geek who is currently pursuing his own projects and regularly enjoys hacking Android, PHP, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Perl, and regular expressions, working on Wordpress plugins and tools, tweaking MySQL queries and server settings, administering Linux machines, blogging, learning new things, and other geeky stuff.
