I'm looking for the best way to duplicate the Linux 'watch' command on Mac OS X. I'd like to run a command every few seconds to pattern match on the contents of an output file using 'tail' and 'sed'.
What's my best option on a Mac, and can it be done without downloading software?
You can emulate the basic functionality with the shell loop:
while :; do clear; your_command; sleep 2; done
That will loop forever, clear the screen, run your command, and wait two seconds - the basic watch your_command
implementation.
You can take this a step further and create a watch.sh
script that can accept your_command
and sleep_duration
as parameters:
#!/bin/bash
# usage: watch.sh <your_command> <sleep_duration>
while :;
do
clear
date
$1
sleep $2
done
your_command
to your_command 2>&1|head -10
sleep ${2:-1}
to make the interval optional.
echo "$(date)"
equivalent to date
?
watch
when the output is more than one screen. Only shows the end, while watch
only shows the top. (Neither is ideal)
Use MacPorts:
$ sudo port install watch
watch
command directly.
watch
command busted in MacPorts?
The shells above will do the trick, and you could even convert them to an alias (you may need to wrap in a function to handle parameters):
alias myWatch='_() { while :; do clear; $2; sleep $1; done }; _'
Examples:
myWatch 1 ls ## Self-explanatory
myWatch 5 "ls -lF $HOME" ## Every 5 seconds, list out home directory; double-quotes around command to keep its arguments together
Alternately, Homebrew can install the watch from http://procps.sourceforge.net/:
brew install watch
It may be that "watch" is not what you want. You probably want to ask for help in solving your problem, not in implementing your solution! :)
If your real goal is to trigger actions based on what's seen from the tail
command, then you can do that as part of the tail itself. Instead of running "periodically", which is what watch
does, you can run your code on demand.
#!/bin/sh
tail -F /var/log/somelogfile | while read line; do
if echo "$line" | grep -q '[Ss]ome.regex'; then
# do your stuff
fi
done
Note that tail -F
will continue to follow a log file even if it gets rotated by newsyslog or logrotate. You want to use this instead of the lower-case tail -f
. Check man tail
for details.
That said, if you really do want to run a command periodically, the other answers provided can be turned into a short shell script:
#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$2" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 SECONDS COMMAND" >&2
exit 1
fi
SECONDS=$1
shift 1
while sleep $SECONDS; do
clear
$*
done
watch 2 cat *
would expand parameters before running the script, so in a directory with files "foo" and "bar", you'd run cat foo bar
every 2 seconds. What behaviour were you expecting?
*
without passing it to the command you run. Try running: mkdir /tmp/zz; touch /tmp/zz/foo; watch -n 2 ls -l /tmp/zz/*
in one window. While that's running, you can touch /tmp/zz/bar
in another window. See if your "watch" sees the change, in the first window. I don't think it will. It doesn't for me. This has nothing to do with Ubuntu vs OSX or Linux vs Unix, it's the behaviour of bash
itself.
watch "ls -l /tmp/zz/*"
but if you remember to use quotes it works with your script as well. :)
I am going with the answer from here:
bash -c 'while [ 0 ]; do <your command>; sleep 5; done'
But you're really better off installing watch as this isn't very clean...
brew install watch
If watch doesn't want to install via
brew install watch
There is another similar/copy version that installed and worked perfectly for me
brew install visionmedia-watch
visionmedia-watch
- it supports colors by default. watch
doesn't, with or without --color
option.
Or, in your ~/.bashrc file:
function watch {
while :; do clear; date; echo; $@; sleep 2; done
}
To prevent flickering when your main command takes perceivable time to complete, you can capture the output and only clear screen when it's done.
function watch {while :; do a=$($@); clear; echo "$(date)\n\n$a"; sleep 1; done}
Then use it by:
watch istats
echo -e
instead of just echo
, to render those line breaks correctly
Try this:
#!/bin/bash
# usage: watch [-n integer] COMMAND
case $# in
0)
echo "Usage $0 [-n int] COMMAND"
;;
*)
sleep=2;
;;
esac
if [ "$1" == "-n" ]; then
sleep=$2
shift; shift
fi
while :;
do
clear;
echo "$(date) every ${sleep}s $@"; echo
$@;
sleep $sleep;
done
Here's a slightly changed version of this answer that:
checks for valid args
shows a date and duration title at the top
moves the "duration" argument to be the 1st argument, so complex commands can be easily passed as the remaining arguments.
To use it:
Save this to ~/bin/watch
execute chmod 700 ~/bin/watch in a terminal to make it executable.
try it by running watch 1 echo "hi there"
~/bin/watch
#!/bin/bash
function show_help()
{
echo ""
echo "usage: watch [sleep duration in seconds] [command]"
echo ""
echo "e.g. To cat a file every second, run the following"
echo ""
echo " watch 1 cat /tmp/it.txt"
exit;
}
function show_help_if_required()
{
if [ "$1" == "help" ]
then
show_help
fi
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
show_help
fi
}
function require_numeric_value()
{
REG_EX='^[0-9]+$'
if ! [[ $1 =~ $REG_EX ]] ; then
show_help
fi
}
show_help_if_required $1
require_numeric_value $1
DURATION=$1
shift
while :; do
clear
echo "Updating every $DURATION seconds. Last updated $(date)"
bash -c "$*"
sleep $DURATION
done
Use the Nix package manager!
Install Nix, and then do nix-env -iA nixpkgs.watch
and it should be available for use after the completing the install instructions (including sourcing . "$HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh"
in your shell).
Success story sharing
brew
on mac.watch
: stackoverflow.com/questions/13593771/…watch
from brew doesn't seem to read the user aliases. When executingwatch somealias
, I get a command not found.watch [command]
when you usewatch somealias
it is assuming thatsomealias
is a command that you can run in your terminal.watch
command is something super hard to implement.