Replace output in a loop in bash scripting

Question

Hi All,

I have a few little scripts that I use for monitoring some aspects of our application that reside in an infinite loop with a 3 second sleep and simply display the output of ps aux | grep -i app_name or mysql -e "SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G" just so I can easily watch for a few mins without hitting any keys, what I'd like to know is how I could 'refresh' the values on the screen instead of appending to them, I guess the best example I have is of top, it refreshes values instead of continuously printing to the screen.

Any help would be extremely appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

you can include the "clear" command in your loop (without looking at your code)

Answer 2

Try watch utility. It runs arbitrary command in configurable interval (-n flag). It also can highlight differences in output between refreshes (-d flag).