watch(1)
NAME
watch - execute a program periodically, showing output fullscreen
SYNOPSIS
watch [options] command
DESCRIPTION
watch runs command repeatedly, displaying its output and errors (the first screenfull). This allows you to watch the program output change over time. By default, command is run every 2 seconds and watch will run until interrupted.
OPTIONS
-d, --differences [permanent]
Highlight the differences between successive updates. Option
will read optional argument that changes highlight to be
permanent, allowing to see what has changed at least once since
first iteration.
-n, --interval seconds
Specify update interval. The command will not allow quicker
than 0.1 second interval, in which the smaller values are
converted. Both '.' and ',' work for any locales.
-p, --precise
Make watch attempt to run command every interval seconds. Try it
with ntptime and notice how the fractional seconds stays
(nearly) the same, as opposed to normal mode where they
continuously increase.
-t, --no-title
Turn off the header showing the interval, command, and current
time at the top of the display, as well as the following blank
line.
-b, --beep
Beep if command has a non-zero exit.
-e, --errexit
Freeze updates on command error, and exit after a key press.
-g, --chgexit
Exit when the output of command changes.
-c, --color
Interpret ANSI color and style sequences.
-x, --exec
command is given to sh -c which means that you may need to use
extra quoting to get the desired effect. This with the --exec
option, which passes the command to exec(2) instead.
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
-v, --version
Display version information and exit.
EXIT STATUS
0 Success.
1 Various failures.
2 Forking the process to watch failed.
3 Replacing child process stdout with write side pipe
failed.
4 Command execution failed.
5 Closing child process write pipe failed.
7 IPC pipe creation failed.
8 Getting child process return value with waitpid(2)
failed, or command exited up on error.
other The watch will propagate command exit status as child
exit status.
NOTES
POSIX option processing is used (i.e., option processing stops at the first non-option argument). This means that flags after command don't get interpreted by watch itself.
BUGS
Upon terminal resize, the screen will not be correctly repainted until the next scheduled update. All --differences highlighting is lost on that update as well. Non-printing characters are stripped from program output. Use "cat -v" as part of the command pipeline if you want to see them. Combining Characters that are supposed to display on the character at the last column on the screen may display one column early, or they may not display at all. Combining Characters never count as different in --differences mode. Only the base character counts. Blank lines directly after a line which ends in the last column do not display. --precise mode doesn't yet have advanced temporal distortion technology to compensate for a command that takes more than interval seconds to execute. watch also can get into a state where it rapid-fires as many executions of command as it can to catch up from a previous executions running longer than interval (for example, netstat taking ages on a DNS lookup).
EXAMPLES
To watch for mail, you might do
watch -n 60 from
To watch the contents of a directory change, you could use
watch -d ls -l
If you're only interested in files owned by user joe, you might use
watch -d 'ls -l | fgrep joe'
To see the effects of quoting, try these out
watch echo $$
watch echo '$$'
watch echo "'"'$$'"'"
To see the effect of precision time keeping, try adding -p to
watch -n 10 sleep 1
You can watch for your administrator to install the latest kernel with
watch uname -r
(Note that -p isn't guaranteed to work across reboots, especially in
the face of ntpdate or other bootup time-changing mechanisms)
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