Colors with unix command “watch”?

Question

Some commands that I use display colors, but when I use them with watch the colors disappears:

watch -n 1 node file.js

Is it possible to ha

Answer 1

Do not use watch ... When you use watch programs can detect they're not writing to a terminal and then strip the color. You must use specific program flags to keep the control codes there.

If you don't know the flags or there isn't you can make a poor's man watch by:

while sleep ; do clear; ; done

It will have a bit of flicker (watch works "double buffered") but for some stuff it is useful enough.

You may be tempted to make a double buffered poor man's watch using

while sleep ; do  > /tmp/file; clear; cat /tmp/file; done

But then you'll hit again the "I am not writing to a terminal" feature.