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rated 0 times [ 5] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 3832 / 2 Years ago, fri, february 4, 2022, 12:14:34

gnu watch is a very useful tool for inspecting a program output: It executes the program and shows the output full-screen every 2 seconds.

Sometimes, I don't want the previous output to be erased, but rather be printed line by line with a time stamp. For that, I use bash scripts like:

while true; 

    do echo -n "`date`   "; 

    ssh ubuntu@server -o ConnectTimeout=1 "uptime" ; 

    sleep 1; 

done

Is there a watch-like tool that can run a command and display its output with a timestamp in a line without erasing previous output?

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Member since Wed, Feb 9, 2022

2 Years ago

answered 2 Years ago rillrage · Accepted Answer

I'd say you've found it in simple loops but you could do a number of things from here:

Write a function to handle that for you

function uberwatch {

    # call: uberwatch <interval> <command>

    while true; do

        "${@:2}";

        sleep $1;

    done

}

You could lodge that somewhere around your ~/.bashrc.

Log the output to file but keep viewing with `watch`

watch ... "command | tee -a watchlog.log"

You'd still only see the latest run-through but you could dig through a historical log if you needed to.