A command line utility to visualize how fast a file is growing?

Question

I want to grok how fast a particular file is growing.

I could do

watch ls -l file

And deduce this information from the rate of change.

Is there something similar that would directly output the rate of growth of the file over time?

Answer 1

tail -f file | pv > /dev/null

But beware that it involves acually reading the file, so it might consume a bit more resources than something that watches just file size.

Answer 2

I have a little perl script that I put in my bash environment as a function:

fileSizeChange <file> [seconds]

Sleep seconds defaults to 1.

fileSizeChange() {
  perl -e '
  $file = shift; die "no file [$file]" unless -f $file; 
  $sleep = shift; $sleep = 1 unless $sleep =~ /^[0-9]+$/;
  $format = "%0.2f %0.2f\n";
  while(1){
    $size = ((stat($file))[7]);
    $change = $size - $lastsize;
    printf $format, $size/1024/1024, $change/1024/1024/$sleep;
    sleep $sleep;
    $lastsize = $size;
  }' "$1" "$2"
}