Bash – Using the Watch Command with Arguments Containing Quotes

bashunixwatch

I'm trying to get watch to work correct with commands that contain quotes, and the watch man page isn't very detailed about how quotes work. To give a concrete example, how can I run the following command inside of watch:

ps -ef | awk -F' ' '{print $2}'

I've tried:

watch "ps -ef | awk -F' ' '{print $2}'"

and

watch 'ps -ef | awk -F\' \' \'{print $2}\''

but neither of these works correctly.

Best Answer

I guess you have to escape the $ sign:

watch "ps -ef | awk -F' ' '{print \$2}'"

otherwise it would be interpreted by the shell which would result in an empty string ("") - i.e. awk would print the whole line.

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