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

How about

# In the makefile:
.PHONY: continuously
continuously:
    while true; do make 1>/dev/null; sleep 3; done  

?

This way you can run

make continuously

and only get output if something is wrong.