These weren't in your bootcamp. They're not in most tutorials. They've been quietly available on every Linux box since before "AI workflow" was a phrase — and they're more useful now than they've ever been.
Try it yourself: clone linux-archaeology-lab, run bash setup.sh, and every command in this article has a working exercise waiting for you.
watch — monitor anything without a single line of code
watch runs a command on a repeating interval and fills your terminal with the refreshing output. That's it. No loop, no sleep, no script.
Why it's back: AI inference runs take time. watch -n1 nvidia-smi is the fastest way to see GPU memory climb and fall without touching the model process at all. watch -n2 'ls outputs/ | wc -l' tells you how far a batch job has gotten. One flag, zero instrumentation.
