Comments on: Install Watch Command on OS X

By: Sam Bowne

Sam Bowne — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 20:15:38 +0000

On OS X 10.8.2, there is no /usr/local/bin directory. Putting it in /usr/bin instead works.

Thanks for this!

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:51:44 +0000

Great little tech note, thanks!

By: Zeke

Zeke — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:58:24 +0000

or you compile it yourself…

http://procps.sourceforge.net/procps-3.2.8.tar.gz
make watch PKG_LDFLAGS=-Wl

why the hassle? the precompiled binary is not working on legacy power pc systems…

By: braz

braz — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 08:22:52 +0000

Very helpful, thanks. However, the install command does not appear to work for me. The directory is not recognized.

By: JDogg

JDogg — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 22:02:08 +0000

Use single or double quotes to surround your watch command.

watch “ls -hal | grep something”

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 13:43:36 +0000

Am I mistaken or is there no possibility to use the pipe with this ‘watch’? I tried “ls -hal | grep something” and it returned “h | grep command not found”.

By: Getting started with Heroku

Getting started with Heroku — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:30:34 +0000

[...] useful when combined with the Unix watch command (if you’re on OS X, you may have to install it manually), which reruns the command periodically so you can see how things are changing in [...]

By: Matthias

Matthias — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 19:54:57 +0000

ehh, download a file from somewhere you haven’t even mentioned before in the post and make it executable, then run it. It’s like the world’s most straight forward virus. I know, it probably isn’t, but one wouldn’t know either way.

You’d probably be safer with macports or fink.

By: Roy P. Ammeraal

Roy P. Ammeraal — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:03:16 +0000

Fink provides `watch’ and a bunch of other useful command line utilities. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fink and http://www.finkproject.org/

By: up0

up0 — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 05:16:13 +0000

This is a life-saver!!! I’ve been running mac and Linux all this time and even I didn’t know about ‘watch’… I’ve been looking for a real-time display app… something like htop/top but for other app on the shell.

By: laJalame

laJalame — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:18:03 +0000

sudo port install watch

By: nissan

nissan — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:53:22 +0000

This is nice one.

By: Testie

Testie — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:13:37 +0000

GeekTool?

By: Mark Szymanski

Mark Szymanski — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:37:27 +0000

This would be perfect for using with GeekTool!

By: Greg

Greg — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 13:18:42 +0000

Thanks, very useful.