...making Linux just a little more fun!
Neil Youngman [ny at youngman.org.uk]
Thanks for this interesting article. If I may offer a small "improvement"
Rather than using the loop
while true do netstat -na | wc sleep 1 done
I would use the watch command, e.g.
watch -n 2 -d 'netstat -na | wc'This seems to be included in both Redhat and Debian, so I guess it's reasonably portable. It's advantages over handcrafting a loop are
1. Brevity 2. The default display shows the command being run and the update interval 3. Some of the extra options are useful. I find the '-d' switch, which highlights differences, can be particularly useful.
Neil
Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
[ CC to author ]
On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 09:40:44AM +0000, Neil Youngman wrote:
> Thanks for this interesting article. If I may offer a small "improvement" > > Rather than using the loop > > while true > do > netstat -na | wc > sleep 1 > done > > I would use the watch command, e.g. > > watch -n 2 -d 'netstat -na | wc' > > This seems to be included in both Redhat and Debian, so I guess it's > reasonably portable. It's advantages over handcrafting a loop are > > 1. Brevity > 2. The default display shows the command being run and the update interval > 3. Some of the extra options are useful. I find the '-d' switch, which > highlights differences, can be particularly useful.
That came to my mind while I was editing Henry's article - I'm a big fan of 'watch', myself. Do note, however, that he's operating in a mixed environment - and, as I recall, 'watch' is not a part of the standard Solaris toolkit (although it's available at Sunfreeware.com), and I don't know anything about 'watch' in FreeBSD. So, portability is probably pretty important. As to brevity, well - as long as it's still readable, anything goes, right?
while netstat -na|wc; do sleep 1; done
-- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *