watch file size on linux

Question

I want to watch the growing size of a single file, so i use this command:

texai@maelstrom ~$ ls -lh club_prod.sql | awk '{print $5}'
116M

Now I want to watch that result each 5 seconds so:

texai@maelstrom ~$ watch -n 5 ls -lh club_prod.sql | awk '{print $5}'

but this command doesn't return any result

Answer 1

You're piping the output of watch into awk. If you simplify your command line, what you have is:

 watch <some arguments> | awk '{print $5}'

That's not what you want. Try:

watch -n 5 "ls -lh club_prod.sql | awk '{print \$5}'"