LKBEN11021: Howto watch the execution of a program periodically
LKB | Created: 02/04/2020 | Version: 0 | Language: EN | Rating: 0 | Outdated: False | Marked for deletion: False
Author: Wim Peeters - Keskon GmbH & Co. KG
Symptom
You need to watch the execution of a command line programm and see it change
Cause
none
Solution
You can use the watch command to do the job. Which watch you can execute a command at a certain time interval and make it show the differences in the output.
e.g.
To see the contents of a directory change you can use:
watch -d ls -l
You stop the output with Ctrl-C
Here we watch the disk space and see it shrink during a big filecopy. We run the command every 30 seconds.
watch -n 30 df -h
There are lots of ways to use the watch command. Just try a few out.
About the Author
Wim Peeters is electronics engineer with an additional master in IT and over 30 years of experience, including time spent in support, development, consulting, training and database administration. Wim has worked with SQL Server since version 6.5. He has developed in C/C++, Java and C# on Windows and Linux. He writes knowledge base articles to solve IT problems and publishes them on the Lubby Knowledge Platform.