Question

I want to copy a file from one location to another every five seconds. I don’t want to set up a cronjob because this is only temporary and needs to be fully under my control.

Can I write a .sh that will do this?

(I’m on Mac OS X.)

Answer 1

The watch command is a good option. If you end up needing more control you can use a while loop:

while [ 1 ]
do
  cp source dest
  sleep 5s
done