The watch Linux command line tool
I’m sure everyone else already knows about watch, but it’s new to me. This little utility executes a program repeatedly at a set interval and displays its output.
I’ve been using it with mysqladmin‘s processlist command like this:
watch -n 1 /usr/bin/mysqladmin -uroot -pMYPASSWORD processlist
Note that this does put your password on display at the top of the command window whilst watch is running. If you don’t want that, you could write a little bash script instead like this one from a friend of mine:
#!/bin/sh
while :
do
sleep 1
clear
mysqladmin -uroot -pMYPASSWORD processlist
done
Either way, we get a display of the MySQL process list every second in a Terminal window and it becomes very easy to see which processes are causing trouble.
Watch is nice. But for this purpose you could also use mytop.
Watch is cool, but mytop is a neat little replacement for what you're doing.
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mysql/mytop/
Thanks for the heads up on mytop :)
Regards,
Rob…
While mytop and friends are better for this particular task, it is worth pointing out
that mysql, mysqldump, etc. take an argument –defaults-file=filename. This allows you to put the user name & password in a file that won't show up in the process list.
–Rob T.
Thanks Rob!
Of course, one reason that I post about what I've learnt is so that people who know more than I do can chip in :)
Regards,
Rob…
Do while was not necessary.
lestr@lestr-nb:~$ export MYUSER="root"
lestr@lestr-nb:~$ echo $MYUSER
root
lestr@lestr-nb:~$ mysqladmin -u $MYUSER processlist
+—–+——+———–+—-+———+——+——-+——————+
| Id | User | Host | db | Command | Time | State | Info |
+—–+——+———–+—-+———+——+——-+——————+
| 218 | root | localhost | | Query | 0 | | show processlist |
+—–+——+———–+—-+———+——+——-+——————+
lestr@lestr-nb:~$
But mtop is better : ))
Hey Rob. Put your password in ~/.my.cnf :)