How can I watch the output that was filtered with grep?

Question

I want to watch the changes of the output

gsettings list-recursively|grep text-scal

which is

org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 1.0  
com.canonical.Unity.Interface text-scale-factor 1.0

but if I try to watch it with

watch gsettings list-recursively|grep text-scal

I get no output, because the pipe seems to be the problem.

How can I still watch the changes?

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/193270/how-to-perform-the-watch-command-onto-expression-with-pipes may be helpful — rogerdpack, Oct 15 '21 at 19:28

score 99 · Accepted Answer · answered May 20 '14 at 09:23

99

You need to enclose the piped command in quotes as follows:

watch -n 2 'gsettings list-recursively|grep text-scal'

This will execute the command gsettings list-recursively|grep text-scal and watch it every two seconds. Note that the time interval is in seconds.

Refer to watch's manual page for more.

answered May 20 '14 at 09:23

jobin

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for me this worked `watch 'ifconfig enp0s26u1u6 | grep "RX packet"'` – muhammad tayyab Aug 22 '23 at 20:08

How can I watch the output that was filtered with grep?

1 Answers1