You're running a program that reads LOTS of files and takes a long time. But it doesn't tell you about its progress. First, run a command in the background, e.g. find /usr/share/doc -type f -exec cat {} + > output_file.txt Then run the watch command. "watch -d" highlights the changes as they happen In bash: $! is the process id (pid) of the last command run in the background. You can change this to $(pidof my_command) to watch something in particular. Show Sample Output

World Cup Live Score of the ongoing match. Alternative to have the live score with the match statistics: watch -n10 --no-title "w3m http://www.livescore.com/ |awk '/live [0-9H]+[^ ]/,/red cards/'" Show Sample Output

Uses the lm-sensors package in Linux to display fan speed. Grep RPM is used to discover lines containing the text RPM, and sed is used to edit out everything but the RPM number. The watch utility is used to update the display every 10 seconds and -d highlights any changes from the previous value. The eval function of Bash is used to execute the command enclosed in the ".." string. Show Sample Output

Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

slighty shorter

spectrum protect's dsmc command shows file names and total amount of restore. This command shows which files are actually open and their siz in GB and highlights the change to the previous output Show Sample Output

It repeats a command, such as free, every five seconds and highlights the differences

verifry if link detected or no and speed of network. Show Sample Output

Might be more useful if you were able to print it in Days HH:MM:SS format as: perl -e '@p=gmtime(234234);printf("%d Days %02d:%02d:%02ds\n",@p[7,2,1,0]);' But I'm not exactly sure how to replace the 234234 with the output of the countdown time. (Having some problems with nested quoting/command substitution). Help would be appreciated :)

To highlight the difference between screen updates

Fully recharge your computer battery and start this script. It will create or clean the file named battery.txt, print a start on it and every minute it will append a time stamp to it. Batteries last few hours, and each hour will have 60 lines of time stamping. Really good for assuring the system was tested in real life with no surprises. The last time stamp inside the battery.txt file is of interest. It is the time the computer went off, as the battery was dead! Turn on your computer after that, on AC power of course, and open battery.txt. Read the first and last time stamps and now you really know if you can trust your computer sensors. If you want a simple line of text inside the battery.txt file, use this: watch -n 60 'date > battery.txt' The time of death will be printed inside Show Sample Output

Variation of the theme, this one blinks in low profile on top level of X, ie, it is visible, indeed small. Try changing fonts and sizes of osd_cat

already described on the other two versions, this one uses ascii characters on game style to display elapsed time. Show Sample Output

On my cluster a D in the states column means it is time to reboot the server.

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 Sample Output

Clock will appear in the top-right corner

You need to have figlet(for font) and cowsay installed. Just copy n paste this command and you can see..... Show Sample Output