Overlooked Tools: 'watch'

There many GNU/Linux command line tools that provide continuously updated statistics or information like iotop, nload, and top. However, it is often necessary to see the output of another simple command or complex chain of tools, updated in real-time.

watch is a Linux command that does just that, and by doing so, is incredibly useful for continuously monitoring the output of any Linux terminal command. Usage of the watch command is incredibly simple, as the following example monitoring the currently running tsp task in the task-spooler queue demonstrates.