In my projects I use a script to watch for changes and recompile/restart with a loop such as: executable=/path/to/target while true; do make build

In my projects I use a script to watch for changes and recompile/restart with a loop such as: executable=/path/to/target while true; do make build if [ ${?} -eq 0 ]; then ${executable} run & pid=${!} fi inotifywait -qq -e create -e modify -e delete --exclude '\.#.*' -r . [ -n "${pid}" ] && kill ${pid}; pid= done This is simplified a bit, as the script usually contains some other things like starting and initializing the database.