til/unix/watch-the-difference.md

Watch The Difference

The watch command is a simple way to repeatedly run a particular command. I'll sometimes use it to monitor the response from some endpoint. watch can make monitoring responses even easier when the -d flag is employed. This flag instructs watch to highlight the parts of the output that are different from the previous run of the command.

So if I run

$ watch -d curl -LIs localhost:3000

I can easily see if the http status of the request changes.