Is there a smarter alternative to “watch make”?

Question

I ran into this useful tip that if you\'re working on files a lot and you want them to build automatically you run:

watch make

And it re-runs make every couple s

Answer 1

This one-liner should do it:

while true; do make --silent; sleep 1; done

It'll run make once every second, and it will only print output when it actually does something.