A handy little Linux application called mytop fits this just perfectly. This is a near-time monitor just like the UNIX utility 'top' that specifically looks at what the MySQL server is doing. It updates every few seconds so you can get a reasonable look at your SQL performance. It's capable of displaying a huge amount of information so be sure to read the documentation. It also assumes that you're connecting to the MySQL server on localhost with the root user and no password. These can be changed either in the script itself or on the command line.