Today's posting covers a function which mimics the 'watch' command, which is popular on Unix and Linux systems. The watch command will repetitively run a command line and display the output. This is useful for watch the progress of systems writing a series of files or waiting for a server to come online. Just start a shell, run the command and park the shell so it is still visible, but out of the way. Even though my function does not do a particularly thorough job mimicking the Unix watch command, I still get a lot of mileage out of it.
This one is so simple that I am just going to paste it in here and hope that the blogging software doesn't drop the formatting. I'm still learning the quirks of blogger, so please bear with me. Here goes:
##############################################################################
# Purpose: More-or-less mimic the popular unix "watch" command
function Watch-Command {
param (
[string] $command,
[int] $interval = 2
)
do {
clear
invoke-expression $command
# Just to let the user know what is happening
"Waiting for $interval seconds. Press Ctrl-C to stop execution..."
sleep $interval
}
# loop FOREVER
while (1 -eq 1)
}
That's it. I normally alias this to watch.
Let's say that you were waiting for a particular file to show up in the temporary directory of your workstation. A simple solution might be:
watch "dir c:\temp\somefile.txt"
This isn't as cute as writing a function to ring the system bell, play a wave file or say "You've got a file.", but it is quick, functional and flexible, which are things we value highly here at the Ashdar Partners blog. It's also already written. I could write a custom-built function to do those things, but why bother when I already have watch?
One quirk with my version of watch is that the quoting of the -command parameter works differently than what you get on bash. On bash, you can often avoid enclosing the whole command in quotes. With my Powershell version, you should probably just go ahead and wrap the command in double quotes because any embedded spaces will require the use of quotes. Stopping a moment to consider the question "should I or shouldn't I add quotes" is more work than just conditioning yourself to do it. It's usually simple enough to wrap the command line in quotes. If you already have complicated quoting in place, or you want to do something that requires some more processing you can get the same effect by writing a little function.
As a simple example, lets say that I want to repetitively perform two tasks. Firstly, I want to output out the time to the console using the following command:
date
and, secondly, I want to look for a particular file using the following command:
dir c:\sqlserver-list.txt
I can do this one of (at least) two ways. The first, and more obvious way, is to wrap everything in quotes and separate the two command with a semicolon.
watch "date ; dir c:\sqlserver-list.txt"
The second, and ultimately more flexible way, is to built a little function with those commands via the command line. This also provides another viewpoint on how flexible Powershell really is. The function can be named anything; for this example I will use the ever-popular foo. Just type in the following in a shell window, hitting return where you see the line breaks here:
function foo {
date
dir c:\sqlserver-list.txt
}
After the closing "}", you will need to hit return twice. This will bring you back to an interactive command line. Then, to prove that we really have a new function, you can run the following two commands to see information about our new function:
dir function:foo
(dir function:foo).Definition
The first command will show you properties of the foo function object. The second command will show you the body ("definition" in Powershell-speak) of the foo function object. Lastly, you can use the function with watch:
watch foo
Lastly, the -interval parameter controls how long the function waits before running the command again. To run our foo function once every 60 seconds, you could use it like this:
watch -command foo -interval 60
Two seconds is a pretty short duration, but it is the default on Linux systems and I saw no real reason to change it.
That's all for this time. Thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment