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up vote 7 down vote favorite

I use the watch command to see the contents of my directory changing as a script runs on it (via watch ls dir/)

It's a great tool, except that I can't seem to scroll down or up to see all of the contents once the number of entries fills the vertical length of the screen.

Is there a way to do this?

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2 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

watch is great, but this is one of the things it can't do. You can use tail to show the latest entries:

watch "ls -rtx dir/ | tail -n $(($LINES - 2))"
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Can you explain why it is necessary to use $(($LINES - 2))" to get the latest entries? – bbaja42 Jun 24 '11 at 20:18
@bbaja42: It fills the screen, leaving a couple of lines for the output of watch itself. $LINES is an automatic variable that Bash and other shells use to contain the number of lines that the screen can display. You could tail any number you want. – Dennis Williamson Jun 25 '11 at 6:00
Can I use the command as is to pipe the output of multiple programs (chained using &&) to tail? – xav0989 Feb 5 at 20:56
@xav0989: You would need to wrap your chain in curly braces or it will only tail the last command: { command1 && command2 && command3; } | tail - don't forget the spaces (after the opening and before closing brace) and semicolon after the last command. Remember, the whole chain will be executed each time watch reruns it. – Dennis Williamson Feb 5 at 22:50
@DennisWilliamson Awesome thanks – xav0989 Feb 6 at 17:55
up vote 3 down vote

I've created a small program that does exactly what you want in python. Find it here.

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