A not so uncommon usecase is needing to run a command repeatedly at fixed intervals, without losing control of your shell. Doing this in the Linux shell is particularly trivial.

I have two quick options for going about this operation:

1. Use job control to run the command in the background
2. Use tmux to view the stdout(and/or stderr) of the command by attaching to the session and detaching when you don't have a need to view the logs.

In these, two cases, I prefer the added option of writing to a log file. This allows me examine what the process has been up to.

Let us pretend we wish to run the date command every 10s

Job Control

We will pipe stdout and stderr to /dev/null so they don't get mixed up messages from foreground processes.

watch -n 10 'date | tee -a output.txt' &>/dev/null &

This runs the date command every ten seconds in the background while appending the output to output.txt and swallowing writes to stdout and stderr.

tmux

If you prefer to view the output of the command interactively, you can use tmux.

This is my preferred option, as I can attach to the session whenever I want see how things are moving on and detach when done. If you aren't familiar with tmux, theres at least a billion useful articles online about what it is and how to use it.

The command in this case will not redirect stdout and stderr to /dev/null.

watch -n 10 'date'