Watch Live Interrupts

June 22nd, 2009 by Chilaka Kumar in

Your rating: None Average: 3.1 (19 votes)

To see the interrupts occurring on your system, run the command:

# watch -n1 "cat /proc/interrupts"

           CPU0       CPU1
 0:         330          0   IO-APIC-edge      timer
 1:       11336          0   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
 4:           2          0   IO-APIC-edge
 6:           3          0   IO-APIC-edge      floppy
 ...
NMI:          0          0   Non-maskable interrupts
LOC:    5806923    6239132   Local timer interrupts
 ...

The watch command executes another command periodically, in this case "cat /proc/interrups". The -n1 option tells watch to execute the command every second.

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Anonymous's picture

Should have at least defined

On June 29th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) says:

Should have at least defined each definition of all the interrupts and what they correlate to. There's no interrupts man page either. Which means it's slightly useless for the average user. Maybe I'm look in the wrong place for a man page, I don't know.

vinit dilip dhatrak's picture

"-d" option.

On June 29th, 2009 vinit dilip dhatrak (not verified) says:

Try -d option of watch command for fancy output with highlights.

e.g.
# watch -d -n1 "cat /proc/interrupts"

kasi's picture

saves a lot of time..

On June 25th, 2009 kasi says:

this command will save a lot of time while we have to run a single command many times.
Thanks.

Anonymous's picture

cool command

On June 22nd, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) says:

I didn't know about the 'watch' command. Sure beats doing a loop with sleep :).

Thanks for the tip!

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