Usages for the Linux "watch" command

Today I learned about the watch command in Linux. It's a brilliant tool for command line monitoring. Basically, it just executes a command repeatedly and displays its output in a readable format.

Examples

Watch your wi-fi network traffic

watch ifconfig wlan0

Watch free memory

watch free

Watch a directory

For example when downloading files

watch ls -lt ~/Downloads

Switches

Set the interval with -n <seconds> or omit the status line with -t. Like this

watch -t -n 1 ifconfig