Bash – less with “update file” like functionality

bashlesswatch

I want to watch a file that gets overwritten every 5 minutes with less. How can I make less follow the new file descriptor instead of keeping the old one displayed? watch "cat file" won't do it because the file is too long to fit into one terminal window.

Best Answer

You can get this effect by issuing the F command (Shift+F) while viewing the file in less. To stop following and switch back to paging, press Ctrl+C

Since your file only changes every 5 minutes, you could also use tail -f and specify a longer sleep time with -s (defaults to 1 second). For instance,

tail -f -s 60 myfile

checks myfile for output every 60 seconds.

EDIT: Due to misleading question, the above answer was unsatisfactory. Second attempt follows:

To re-open the same file in less every 5 minutes, try this:

while true; do ( sh -c 'sleep 600 && kill $PPID' & less myfile ); done

This will spawn a subshell which backgrounds another shell process instructed to kill its parent process after 5 minutes. Then it opens the file with less. When the backgrounded shell command kills the parent subshell, it kills all its children, including the "less" command. Then the loop starts the process over again.

The only easy way I know of to kill this is to kill the terminal your original shell is in. If that's unacceptable, you can use the "killfile" trick:

touch killfile
while [ -f killfile]; do stuff; done

To stop doing stuff, rm the killfile in another shell.

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