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Cygwin has no watch command?

I am in the process of learning Unix commands; I started a few days back. I read a post here and tried to use the watch command, but my terminal - Cygwin - displays command not found! Why does this happen? It happens with other commands like clear too.

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  • All the bellow answers give good inputs and are perfectly on point but if you came here from google and want to have watch in Cygwin install the package procps-ng.
    – Frankie
    Commented Feb 23, 2017 at 18:52

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Cygwin has a package manager that lets you install commands which may be missing in the standard selection of Cygwin. You can get to it by running Cygwin's setup.exe (there might probably be a better way).

However I have to second the recommendation for running a real Linux in a VM such as VirtualBox. Cygwin is nice for some Linux flavour running natively in Windows but it's very different from a real Linux installation as Cygwin has to work on top of a exe file environment.

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Cygwin, together with emulating a unix command line, a shell for that matter, is not a 100% equivalent of any UNIX shell. Hence, different functionality of some applications from their UNIX counterparts and some totally not working UNIX commands, should be expected. It was never intended to be a UNIX training platform as far as I know.

If you are serious about learning unix, assuming you have a semi-decent and recently built machine with ample memory, also assuming you don't want to give up your windows comfort by booting into a secondary linux partition, I'd suggest using Oracle's virtual box to create a virtual partition under windows and run a real unix operating system on it, not like a unix shell emulator. You will find all your commands there and their expected behavior will be the same as you are running it on a physical machine, except the commands that probe hardware of course.

If you are confused, just google the term "VirtualBox for beginners". You will find a myriad of reading material.

Good luck

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  • FWIW, neither watch nor clear are standard Unix commands, so are not guaranteed to be found on any Unix. Watch is often found on Linux, but even there, there exist at least two non-compatible implementations.
    – Stéphane Chazelas
    Commented Feb 3, 2013 at 20:02

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