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

Using classic gnu make and inotifywait, without interval-based polling:

watch:
    while true; do \
        make $(WATCHMAKE); \
        inotifywait -qre close_write .; \
    done

This way make is triggered on every file write in the current directory tree. You can specify the target by running

make watch WATCHMAKE=foo