Cygwin has no watch command

cygwin;watch

I installed Cygwin on my Windows XP to use some of its commands. Now I what to check a file every 2 minutes and want to use watch for this purpose but I see that Cygwin has no such command. Is this really true? what can I do instead?

Best Answer

There is watch in cygwin. But it isn't installed by default. You need to install procps-ng package to appear watch. (you can run cygwin installer again and it allows to install only the missed packages without reinstalling the whole cygwin)

Instead of watch you can use simple cycle like:

while true ; do check file ; sleep 2 ; done

where check is your command of choice.

Related Solutions

Output of ‘watch’ command as a list

You can use the -t switch to watch which causes it not to print header. However, that will still clear the screen so you might be better off with a simple shell loop:

while sleep 1; do
    wc -l my.log
done

One of the advantages is, that you can easily add other commands (e.g. date) and/or pipe the output through sed to reformat it. By the way, if you swap sleep 1 with wc in the loop, it will automatically terminate on errors.

How to get traceroute on cygwin

There is no traceroute in the Cygwin packages, because tracert is always available on Windows. See https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2005-12/msg00443.html for a thread briefly discussing this. You can try compiling a Unix-style traceroute from source usign Cygwin.

If you want to compare Windows-style tracert to Unix-style traceroute though, I'd recommend running traceroute on Unix or Linux, because the network stacks are different; so running a Unix-style traceroute on Windows won't give you quite the same network traces as Unix-style traceroute on Unix.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Output of ‘watch’ command as a list

How to get traceroute on cygwin

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