Have you been in a situation that you wanted to know how to

watch

There are some situations where running a command only once is not enough, and you might have to run it in a continuous fashion. This sometimes happen when you have to track the status of a process and there is not an async way of checking and only a polling method is available, such as a status endpoint.

In those cases, you may want to use the command watch that will execute the command that you pass as a parameter every n seconds.

watch -n 1 'curl -s localhost:27182/api/v1/progress -X GET | jq .'

Bonus tip: If the return of the command you are executing has a JSON format, you can execute jq command to parse it so it can be parsed on every execution. Watch out, because if you don't add the . after jq, the command will not work properly.

scp

If you want to copy a file from your VM (in this case an EC2 instance in AWS) to your local instance using scp (copy through ssh):

scp -i "david-sanchez-key.pem" ec2-user@ec2-1-10-15-121.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:/home/ec2-user/logs.log /Users/user/Downloads

You have to replace the following:

• Path to the key
• VM username
• VM hostname
• VM path to file to copy
• Local destination path

And if you want to copy from your local to your VM:

scp -i "david-sanchez-key.pem" /Users/folder1/logs.log ec2-user@ec2-1-10-15-121.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:/home/ec2-user