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

You could try using something like inotify-tools. It will let you watch a directory and run a command when a file is changed or saved or any of the other events that inotify can watch for. A simple script that does a watch for save and kicks off a make when a file is saved would probably be useful.