Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Is there a way to actively monitor the modified dates of all files or directories in a current directory? I am using the BASH shell.
By actively I mean run a command once and then be able to monitor the changes of the time stamps as they change for each file (similarly to how the top command shows you the active processes and only needs to be run once), as opposed to manually running ls -lt many times and seeing what has changed.
I'd say, watch ls -lt should do exactly what you want. With standard settings, it calls ls -lt every 2 seconds and shows the result. It has several interesting options, such as watch -n 5 -d ls -lt, which updates every 5 seconds (-n 5) and highlights the changes (-d).
