Watch is a great utility that is generally available on Linux servers and desktops. For Mac, however, it’s not part of the install, but you can download it and install it.
To do so, perform the following steps:
1. Use your browser or wget to download http://sveinbjorn.org/files/software/watch-0.3-macosx.zip
2. unzip watch-0.3-macosx.zip
3. sudo make install
The command will install to /usr/local/bin/watch.
To use it, run a command like this:
watch -n 2 “du -sh /path/to/my/file”
Which will check the size of the file /path/to/my/file and report on it every two minutes.
