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

@Dobes Vandermeer -- I have a script named "mkall" that runs make in every subdirectory. I could assign that script as a cron job to run every five minutes, or one minute, or thirty seconds. Then, to see the output, I'd redirect gcc results (in each individual makefile) to a log in each subdirectory.

Could something like that work for you?

It could be pretty elaborate so as to avoid makes that do nothing. For example, the script could save the modify time of each source file and do the make when that guy changes.