Job Snijders wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I often find myself reaching for a type of utility not in base, "watch".
>
> A makeshift solution is "$ while true; do THING; sleep 1; clear; done",
> but I often end up spending too much time tweaking such impromptu
> oneliners, essentially cooking up hairy shell scripts with no newlines.
>
> For years I used 'gnuwatch' from ports, it works okayish, but the name
> spells out an issue. Then, this weekend I discovered yazuoka@'s
> excellent ports/sysutils/iwatch and decided to prepare it for OpenBSD.
>
> https://github.com/iij/iwatch v1.0.4 was my starting point.
>
> compared to iwatch:
>  - removed colorizing capability / style via environment variable
>  - changed a number of keyboard commands (added arrows/pgup/pgdown)
>  - rewrote the man page
>  - made interactive mode more like top(1)/systat(1)
>  - added 'pause on error' feature
>  - added pledge/unveil
>
> watch compared to gnuwatch:
>   - also uses '-n' to set the desired interval (this aspect probably
>     makes the tools interchangable for 99% of users)
>   - gnuwatch lacks some interactive toggles
>   - gnuwatch can highlight changed characters, but not words and lines;
>     the latter two often provide great clarity in a visual fashion.
>   - gnuwatch lacks the ability to scroll through the command's output
>
> This is still a bit rough around the edges, but perhaps we can work on
> it together in tree? Your feedback is most welcome!
>
> お疲れ様でした
>
> Job

Hi Job,

This is really cool! It seems relevant for base to me, personally, but
not sure what the committers think.

This could probably wait till later, but especially since there's
already some regression testing in the iwatch repository, I feel it'd be
nice to carry that over if possible.

And for the most minor of suggestions, I personally like when programs
exit with status 2 for usage-related issues.

Anyway, nice work! I hope to see it in base soon.

-Henrich