At certain times while using Gentoo you are going to have to perform a large emerge, for example when you do an update world. It can be challenging to keep track of the status of this emerge with all the output flying by on the screen. It can also become a problem if you want to check on the status from another machine that did not initiate the emerge.

Thankfully you can check the /var/log/emerge.log and get the current status.

Run this command to see the last 10 lines of the log.

$ sudo tail /var/log/emerge.log

You can combine this command with watch and get real-time updates. This command will automatically update every second.

$ watch -n 1 "sudo tail /var/log/emerge.log"

Likewise you can use the ‘-f‘ tail option to get updates.

$ sudo tail -f /var/log/emerge.log

Related posts

1. View program output with watch
2. Speed up Gentoo emerge with “parallel-fetch”
3. Find the exit status of a previous command in Bash

Watch runs a program at regular interval and continuously displays the output. This allows you keep track of the changes that are occurring in the program over time.

Run watch in the following way.

watch [options] command

By default watch updates the command output every 2 seconds. To change this interval us the ‘-n seconds‘ option.

This will keep an eye on the changes occurring in your home directory. This will update the command output every second.

$ watch -n 1 ls -l ~/

If you use the ‘-d‘ option, watch will highlight the differences between the current and previous update. Adding ‘-d=cumulative‘ will make the highlights permanent, allowing you to see what has changed throughout the entire run.

$ watch -d=cumulative ls -l ~/

String longer commands together by enclosing them in single quotes.

$ watch 'cat logfile | grep somestring'

Watch will continue to run until you exit the program by pressing Ctrl-C.

Related posts

1. View the status of a long emerge
2. View dynamic library dependencies with ldd
3. View real-time system statistics with top