I want to keep an eye on a file as it is created. So I used this command

ls -hal ./file |awk '{print $5}'

which gives the size of the file I am looking for. I use awk because I don't need other stuff, just the file size.

But I'm unable to use this with watch command, because if I try

watch ls -hal ./file |awk '{print $5}'

then watch only accepts ls -hal ./file and then pipes it to awk, giving no output.

If I try

watch "ls -hal ./file |awk '{print $5}'"

then it gets weird showing wrong command and whole output.

Every 2.0s: ls -hal ./file |awk '{print }'              Sun Jul 20 15:52:18 2014



-rw-rw---- 1 aditya aditya 1.7K Jul 20 15:52 ./file

You can see there is no $5 in the awk command.

Further quoting creates various similar errors.

So what is the right way to quote this command?