Bash oneliner: watch a filesize

25 June, 2012

Sometimes, when running a long operation modifying a single file, I want to monitor its progress by watching that file’s size increase. Here’s a simple one-liner which will print the incrementing filesize until Ctrl-C is pressed:

while true; do echo -e -n "\r`ls -l -h FILENAME | awk '{ print $5 }'`"; done
bash, oneliners, shell