Commands tagged watch

Shows a simple clock in the console

-t param removes the watch header

Ctrl-c to exit

Note:

1) -n option of watch accepts seconds

2) -t option of notify-send accepts milliseconds

3) All quotes stated in the given example are required if notification

message is more than a word.

4) I couldn't get this to run in background (use of & at the end fails). Any

suggestions/improvements welcome.

To monitor .vmdk files during snapshot deletion (commit) on ESX only (ESXi doesn't have the watch command):

1. Navigate to the VM directory containing .vmdk files.

# watch "ls -tough --full-time *.vmdk"

where:

-t sorts by modification time

-o do not list group information (to narrow the output)

-u sorts by access time

-g only here for the purpose to easily remember the created mnemonic word 'tough'

-h prints sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

--full-time sets the time style to full-iso and does not list user information (to narrow the output)

optionally useful parameters to the watch command:

-d highlight changes between updates

-n seconds to wait between updates (default is 2)

-t turn off printing the header

This command shows the size of directories below here, refreshing every 2s.

It will also track directories created after running the command (that what the find bit does).

Show active calls as the happen on an Asterisk server. Note that the Asterisk command (in single quotes) is formatted for Asterisk 1.6. Use the -n flag on the watch command to modify the refresh period (in seconds - default is 2 seconds).

Show a simple table with disk IO for the specified host. you monitor a LOT of different thing. Mostly used for MRTG and similar, but this is nice for a quick look, which disk is busy.

"public" is your SNMP community

ensure that snmpd is running on the host which you intend to monitor

To highlight the difference between screen updates

If you need to keep an eye on a command whose output is changing, use the watch command. For example, to keep an eye on your load average

This will allow you to watch as matches occur in real-time. To filter out only ACCEPT, DROP, LOG..etc, then run the following command: watch 'iptables -nvL | grep -v "0 0" && grep "ACCEPT"' The -v is used to do an inverted filter. ie. NOT "0 0"

to omit "grep -v", put some brackets around a single character

Shows all those processes; useful when building some massively forking script that could lead to zombies when you don't have your waitpid()'s done just right.

This command finds the 5 (-n5) most frequently updated logs in /var/log, and then does a multifile tail follow of those log files.

Alternately, you can do this to follow a specific list of log files:

sudo tail -n0 -f /var/log/{messages,secure,cron,cups/error_log}

This command displays a clock on your terminal which updates the time every second. Press Ctrl-C to exit.

A couple of variants:

A little bit bigger text:

You can try other figlet fonts, too.

Big sideways characters:

This requires a particular version of banner and a 40-line terminal or you can adjust the width ("30" here).