The 'watch' program is a cool hack that uses curses to provide a dynamically
updating display of the output of a user-specified program on a user-specified
interval.  It takes the pain out of watching things like 'df', 'ps', 'uusnap',
and so forth when you're watching something happen and would like to be able
to run the command over and over again to see how some resource utilization
is changing.

I'm not at all sure where 'watch' originated.  A long time ago, someone inside
HP wrote a utility called 'follow' that did most of what watch does, but was
specific to HP terminals.  At some point, I needed a hunk of code to do the
same thing on ANSI terminals, specifically xterms, and in trolling around, I
tripped over watch.c with no copyright, no documentation, not even a comment
in the source file.  I have no idea now where it came from, or who wrote that
first hunk of code from which this is derived.

There were several problems with the program as I acquired it, and I spent a
bit of time learning enough about curses to fix them.  I wrote a simple man
page and contributed watch to BSDI.  Jeff Polk cleaned the man page source
up a bit, and I've shamelessly adopted his changes in my source.

Other than its inclusion in the BSD/OS distribution under the contrib tree,
this packaging for Debian Linux is the first time I've "gone public" with this
little gem.  I hope it proves as useful for others as it has proven for me.

Bdale Garbee, bdale@gag.com, Thu Oct 19 01:18:16 MDT 1995

