Cygwin has no watch command?

Question

I installed Cygwin on my Windows XP to use some of its commands. Now I what to check a file every 2 minutes and want to use watch for this purpose but I see that Cygwin has no such command. Is this really true? what can I do instead?

Answer 1

There is watch in cygwin. But it isn't installed by default. You need to install procps-ng package to appear watch. (you can run cygwin installer again and it allows to install only the missed packages without reinstalling the whole cygwin)

Instead of watch you can use simple cycle like:

while true ; do check file ; sleep 2 ; done

where check is your command of choice.

Answer 2

watch is included in procps-ng, so you should install the procps-ng package for Cygwin.

Answer 3

Apparently procps is outdated, watch can now be found in the procps-ng package.

Answer 4

Installed the ncurses package and then I get a clear screen on every run. Thank you rush.

I ran mine as

while true ; do clear; <command> <file> ; sleep 2 ; done

such as

while true ; do clear; grep ERROR server.log | tail -n 5 ; done