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CSS Sass Basics (retired) Getting Started with Sass Installing and Using Sass

Corey Standish
Corey Standish
14,835 Points
Posted by Corey Standish
Corey Standish
14,835 Points

Sass to terminal to css

My terminal is stalling after saving test.scss . It says : >>> Sass is watching for changes. Press Ctrl-C to stop.

Change detected to: test.scss write test.css nothing happens in my test.css file

1 Answer

qdzfplofsk
qdzfplofsk
22,025 Points
qdzfplofsk
qdzfplofsk
22,025 Points

Hi Corey,

When you start the ruby sass --watch process it needs to keep running to watch for changes in your sass folder so it will keep "watching" until you cancel the process by typing Ctrl + C. When this process is running you may think your terminal is stalling but it's just busy, you can't type in other commands until you do one of these:

  1. Ctrl + C - but this cancels sass watching/processing so not ideal unless you don't need to preprocess .scss files
  2. Create a new $ process by creating a new tab (Cmd + T) in Terminal on Mac - the watch process keeps running as long as you don't close tab
  3. If you want to stay in the same shell you can put the sass watch process in the background by typing Cmd + Z which will pause the process until you type "fg" for foregrouind.

It can be a little confusing because everybody calls it "sass" and the folder is usually called "sass" yet it's not a .sass file (older format) but actually a .scss file. I see more people using the folder structure scss/style.scss instead of sass/style.scss to avoid confusion. Remember to make sure you are in the correct directory when you start your sass watch with the correct flags like sass --watch scss:css