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

I do it this way in my Makefile:

watch:
    (while true; do make build.log; sleep 1; done) | grep -v 'make\[1\]'

build.log: ./src/*
    thecompiler | tee build.log

So, it will only build when my source code is newer than my build.log, and the "grep -v" stuff removes some unnecessary make output.