Using the watch command with an argument that contains quotes

Question

I'm trying to get watch to work correct with commands that contain quotes, and the watch man page isn't very detailed about how quotes work. To give a concrete example, how can I run the following command inside of watch:

ps -ef | awk -F' ' '{print $2}'

I've tried:

watch "ps -ef | awk -F' ' '{print $2}'"

and

watch 'ps -ef | awk -F\' \' \'{print $2}\''

but neither of these works correctly.

Answer 1

I guess you have to escape the $ sign:

watch "ps -ef | awk -F' ' '{print \$2}'"

otherwise it would be interpreted by the shell which would result in an empty string ("") - i.e. awk would print the whole line.

Answer 2

You could always put your command in a shell script, then "watch" the script.

Answer 3

I just met a similar problem. After reading the watch Man Page, I found a solution that could work, which is to concatenate strings in bash. The final command looked weird, such as:

watch "ps -ef | awk -F' ' '"'{print $2}'"'"

or

watch 'ps -ef | awk -F'"' ' '"'{print $2}'"'"