Linux Crash Course - The 'watch' Command

When it comes to computing, it's often said that the key to efficiency is to not repeat yourself. That's true. Except for the the watch command - it's intended use-case is to repeat a command over and over. Believe it or not, it can really come in handy. Learn all about the watch command by watching this watch tutorial.

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*⏰ TIME CODES*
00:00 - Intro
02:06 - An example of the watch command in action in a Linux Shell
04:20 - Using the watch command to keep an eye on your server's storage
05:02 - Keeping an eye on your server's memory usage with the watch command
06:25 - Highlighting changes while using the watch command on your Linux Server
07:14 - Using the -n option with the find command to tweak the repeat interval
09:02 - How to use the watch command with a command that contains pipes or redirects*🎓 FULL LINUX COURSES FROM LEARN LINUX TV*

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[kote]

At work, I used watch to diagnose scales. There were scales that transmitted data to a computer via USB. The program from the manufacturer allowed me to get the weight once, I ran it through watch with a minimum delay (0.1 second) and moved the cable to determine the bad contact.

Worth mentioning, in FreeBSD the built-in watch command does something very different. The command from GNU/Linux is called gnu-watch there.

[wisteela]

I will be making a lot of use of this command.

And for fun, a fortune every minute.

I love finding out about new commands to me.

[ritchiebluesman]

Hi from France,
Former Linux fighter since RedHat 5.5 where you had to install everything in text mode, I am currently on the Zorin OS 16.2 Core.
Thanx for your humour and very serious videos... 😎
Best wishes 2023 🥂🍀

[rotflol]

watch -n 10 -d is my default goto, with df -h or ls -la

[Not-THAT-ChrisPratt]

I use the watch command in connection with the sensors command to keep an eye on system temps: 'watch sensors -f'
The -f flag puts the output in degrees F, the default is degrees C.

[binbashbuddy]

I was gonna recommend you do inotify and incrontab, see someone else also mentioned them. Very important tools on our servers.

[rotflol]

use watch to build a custom top-like overview of system resources, files, cluster info or whatever you want to monitor 8-)

[Not-THAT-ChrisPratt]

Great video, as always, Jay!
I realized something when you ran 'watch free -h' and you did not go into the details about the free command. Your videos follow one of the Unix principles: Do one thing and do it well. All your videos follow this, and I appreciate this. ;-)
Keep up the great work.

[damianpodgorski]

Enjoyed this video! Your channel is a real gem on youtube. Please continue producing such a great content in 2023 :) Happy holidays for you and your family

[Goldcrowdnetwork]

Extremely helpful as all of your tutorials have been

[remychrist]

very good guy, very good videos - Linux is so easy with it - Thank you very much Jay

[Ranblv]

good video. I might have the courage to start the bash series this weekend.

[TradersTradingEdge]

Love this series, thanks Jay.
Have a happy Christmas time.

[bobsisic]

Can I build a web page or server for all my photos for people to look at, thru a iPad only, or is that what Linode is for?

[mlm.online-um]

Hello Jay. Can you make some lessons about Linode?

[peterjansen]

I have been combining watch with sensors for years and of course I aliased it. To see the temperatures of my hardware and the power of my graphics card. Sadly there still is a bug in the drivers for both the fan-rpm (Bad motherboard-support for Linux? The graphics card rpm is shown, the case-fan and CPU-fan RPM are not) and the CPU-power. AMD used to show the CPU-power for Zen2 but quit doing that because it was not always accurate and AMD wanted to prevent users from damaging their hardware because they used wrong data (official communication from AMD).

[bobbydigital]

I usually use inotifytools to watch files. When my script detects changes it then does a bunch of stuff like load a file to a database.

[richardpremeaux]

Hey Jay I enjoy your videos. I would like see a video on the tldr command/apt. It would fit right in with your videos. We could do a: tldr watch and read along as you discribe the use of the command. It's a short version of the --man option. Folks if you want to do something crazy try this command: compgen -c.
This will print a list of all the commands to the terminal. You will get about 5000 items scrolling up your screen so do a tldr on it first.

[wesgould]

This seems very similar to inotifywait /inotifywatch. I wonder if the watch command can be used in a comparable way. I have an inotifywait script running that watches my game screenshots folder then posts new screenshots to discord automatically.

[hansisbrucker]

If you use `watch -n 1 -t date` you'll have a clock 😂