How to start a command every 5 seconds on Solaris?

Question

How to start a command for example ls -la every 5 seconds on Solaris ? . I'm searching for something like watch -n 5 ls -la

• Carpette: and what's wrong with watch ?
• Jeff Schaller: @Carpette, I'm not sure it comes with a default Solaris installation; I see a 3rd-party package available at opencsw.org/packages/CSWwatch
• Bratchley: FWIW OpenCSW is a pretty common repo for installing software on Solaris. I would just as a matter of best practice have it available unless you have a reason to leave it off (security clearance or some such).

Answer 1

You can make a script using sleep, as described in this ticket Basically, this make something like that:

while true
do 
 ls -la
 sleep 5
done

You can launch this in a screen if you want to reach it at any moment, or you can redirect the output in a file that you can consult at any time (because i think screen, as watch, isn't installed with the basic solaris installation).

Answer 2

Building on both answers by @Carpette and @AmitSanghvi:

Loops of the form

while true
do
 ...
 sleep 5
done

can be notoriously difficult to interrupt with Ctrl+C. On the other hand, the sleep interval is a prime target for keyboard interruption.

Better is:

while sleep 5
do
 ...
done

Answer 3

To build on the earlier answer by @Carpette ... here's a parameterised version of the same script.

if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
 echo "ERROR: Syntax is script <command> interval"
 exit
fi
while true
do
 eval "${1}"
 echo "
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"
 sleep 2ドル
done

Example usage:

~/scripts/watch.sh "tail -10 /oracle/home/alert.log" 5