So every once in a while I want to see the progress of an upload or backup. So I turn to the watch command in Linux. The watch command gives the user the ability to re-run a command and see the updated output.

The syntax is ‘watch -n -d .

So for watching a file downloads progress you could run the following:

watch -n 30 ls -l filedownloading

This would show the ls output and you could watch the size of the file grow as it is dowload progress.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2011 at 10:21 am and is filed under Linux, Scripting, Utilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.