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Watchexec 1.24.0

Release notes

Software development often involves running the same commands over and over. Boring! Watchexec is a simple, standalone tool that watches a path and runs a command whenever it detects modifications. Install it today with cargo-binstall watchexec-cli, from the binaries below, find it in your favourite package manager, or build it from source with cargo install watchexec-cli.

In this release:

  • New: start/stop messages are now in colour. Use --colour=never (--color also accepted) to disable, or the conventional always and auto. (#144, #237, #698)
  • New: --timings to print how long the command took. (#278, #698)
  • New: --quiet to disable printing any message (except warning and error logs). (#698)
  • New: --bell to ring the terminal bell on command end. (#238, #698)
  • New: --ignore-nothing to switch on all the --no-*-ignore flags. (#275, #625, #695)
  • New: --only-emit-events disables launching a command, and only prints events to stdout. Requires --emit-events-to to specify the format to print. This lets you obtain a stream of change events to handle directly rather than mediating via a command. (#676, #691)
  • New: --map-signal to map signals received by Watchexec to other signals sent to the command. (#151, #387, #710)
  • Change: --emit-events-to stdin and json-stdin modes are renamed to stdio and json-stdio respectively; the old names are aliased to preserve compatibility.

Other changes:

  • Uses the Watchexec library 3.0. (#601)
  • -w /dev/null disables watching any files. This is the literal string /dev/null, it won't detect the null device via links or fifos. (#601)
  • Running as PID1 (e.g. in Docker) is fully supported. (#140, #601, #624)
  • Performance improvements and bugfixes around reaping processes (via command-group 5). (#601)
  • Performance improvements and bugfixes around watching files (via notify 6). (#601)
  • Clear the screen before printing events, so --print-events and --clear can meaningfully be used together. (#601)
  • Hint that more or less help is available with long --help and short -h flags. (#601)
  • The PDF version of the manual page is gone, due to the tooling I used disappearing, and the general ugliness of its typesetting. (#710)

Packages

OS Arch Variant Download Checksums
Linux AArch64 glibc DEB (2 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
RPM (2.3 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
XZ (2 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
musl DEB (2 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
RPM (2.4 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
XZ (2 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
ARMv7 HF glibc DEB (2 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
RPM (2.4 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
XZ (2 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
IBM Z glibc DEB (2.6 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
RPM (3 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
XZ (2.6 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
PowerPC glibc DEB (2.1 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
RPM (2.5 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
XZ (2.1 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
x86 musl DEB (2.3 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
RPM (2.5 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
XZ (2.3 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
x86-64 glibc DEB (2.3 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
RPM (2.4 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
XZ (2.2 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
musl DEB (2.4 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
RPM (2.6 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
XZ (2.3 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
Windows x86-64 MSVC Zip (2.5 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
macOS AArch64 XZ (1.5 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512
x86-64 XZ (1.7 MB) BLAKE3 SHA256 SHA512

View release on GitHub.

Checksums

BLAKE3 checksums
SHA256 checksums
SHA512 checksums

version released on 2023-12-09 | this page built on 2026-03-30 at 18:52 | generator v0.0.2 | json metadata