display number of files in current moment like what tail -f do

Question

I have a folder which files are copied to it like /home/my/. I want to run a command which shows number of files inside it in real time like what tail -f do with file contents. I know I should run ls *|wc -l to count files but I don't know how to do it for monitoring and keep it running.

Answer 1

If you have the watch command available on your distribution, you can run it like this:

watch -n 1 "ls /home/my"

This will run the ls /home/my command every n seconds (1 in this example) and will display the output to the screen.

Hope that can help.

Answer 2

Without watch you can try:

while sleep 1 ; do ls /home/my ; done