From: Job Snijders <job@sobornost.net>
Subject: Re: responsive watch wip
To: Ted Unangst <tedu@tedunangst.com>
Cc: tech@openbsd.org
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2025 06:23:02 +0000

Hi Ted,

Thanks for looking into this!

Something isn't quite right: watch 'date; sleep 5; date' displays
the output of date(1) every second and you can see duplicates
running in the process tree:

     `-- watch date; sleep 5; date
       |-- /bin/sh -c date; sleep 5; date
       | `-- sleep 5
       |-- /bin/sh -c date; sleep 5; date
       | `-- sleep 5
       |-- /bin/sh -c date; sleep 5; date
       | `-- sleep 5
       |-- /bin/sh -c date; sleep 5; date
       | `-- sleep 5
       `-- /bin/sh -c date; sleep 5; date
         `-- sleep 5

The correct behaviour is that watch displays the date(1) output every
5 seconds. The interval is intended to be "the pause between runs",
not "execute command every X seconds, duplicates are fine". I hope
this clarifies.

Kind regards,

Job