Every time I download and copy a map to /baseq3 I have to restart Quake3 for it to see the newly place file. Is there a way to make it refresh what files are available without having to restart?

That depends on a lot of things.

First off, was Quake III running in a windowed mode when you added it to your baseq3 folder? Also what map did you download?

To refresh, exit Quake III and start it up again. Simple as that.

"First off, was Quake III running in a windowed mode when you added it to your baseq3 folder? Also what map did you download?"
I run in windowed mode, but I kinda doubt that would matter. For any downloaded map, no map in particular.

"To refresh, exit Quake III and start it up again. Simple as that."
Well the title of this thread included "without having to restart Quake3". When you change a video setting you can type vid_restart to enact it, when you change g_gametype you can type map_restart to enact it. I'm wondering if there's a some command like dir_refresh causing it to refresh what files are present in the Quake3 file system.

You can use the console command \game_restart. I'm not 100% sure if this is a "standard" command however as I use IOQuake3 and this works for me.

Thanks for the info Tig! I tried this in Quake3 1.32c, but there's no such command. It probably doesn't exist but I thought I'd ask just to make sure. I guess one has to use a source port like IOQuake3 for this functionality.