How can I watch the output that was filtered with grep?

Question

I want to watch the changes of the output

gsettings list-recursively|grep text-scal

which is

org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 1.0  
com.canonical.Unity.Interface text-scale-factor 1.0

but if I try to watch it with

watch gsettings list-recursively|grep text-scal

I get no output, because the pipe seems to be the problem.

How can I still watch the changes?

score 112 · Accepted Answer · answered May 20 '14 at 09:23

You need to enclose the piped command in quotes as follows:

watch -n 2 'gsettings list-recursively|grep text-scal'

This will execute the command gsettings list-recursively|grep text-scal and watch it every two seconds. Note that the time interval is in seconds.

Refer to watch's manual page for more.

How can I watch the output that was filtered with grep?

1 Answers1