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Month: August 2013

Bash: Watching Aliases

If you’re trying to watch the output of an alias, you need to make watch an alias of watch as well.

For example, if you have an alias like say:

alias zfslist='zfs list -o name,volsize,used,avaiable,referenced,compressratio,mountpoint'

And want to watch the output over time as if you ran:

user@host:~/$ watch zfslist

Then you need to set up watch as an alias to watch, as follows.

alias watch='watch '

The space after watch is necessary to get bash to expand subsequent aliases after the first one.