WATCH(1) User Commands 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, the program is run every 2 seconds. By default, 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.
-p, --precise
Make watch attempt to run command every interval seconds. Try it with ntptime and notice how the frac‐
tional 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.
NOTE
Note that 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.
EXAMPLES
To watch for mail, you might do
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)
BUGS
Upon terminal resize, the screen will not be correctly repainted until the next scheduled update. All --dif‐
ferences 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 dis‐
play 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 execu‐
tions 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).
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.
AUTHORS
The original watch was written by Tony Rems ⟨[email protected]⟩ in 1991, with mods and corrections by Francois
Pinard. It was reworked and new features added by Mike Coleman ⟨[email protected]⟩ in 1999. The beep, exec, and
error handling features were added by Morty Abzug ⟨[email protected]⟩ in 2008. On a not so dark and stormy
morning in March of 2003, Anthony DeRobertis ⟨[email protected]⟩ got sick of his watches that should update
every minute eventually updating many seconds after the minute started, and added microsecond precision. Uni‐
code support was added in 2009 by Jarrod Lowe ⟨[email protected]⟩
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