Okay, so I’ve been reading about dotfile management apps such as GNU Stow, and I love the idea. I have a good grasp on how it works. Seems like it should work flawlessly for corralling all my dotfiles into one folder so I can easily clone them across machines. Makes sense for apps whose config folders and files are named something static like ~/.config/appname/settings.conf.
That said, can somebody help me understand the cloning/syncing workflow for apps that generate folders and/or files with dynamic/random/inconsistent names? For example, I’m thinking of Firefox, which creates folders with seemingly random strings for each profile.
Do I just need to clone my Firefox profiles before I launch Firefox for the first time on a new machine? Can I configure GNU Stow w/ something like *.Profile for the top level folder name? Am I doomed to manually syncing my Firefox settings, or is there some other trick for handling these dynamically named configs that I haven’t come across in the tutorials yet? This little cliff hanger is pretty much the last thing stopping me from installing GNU Stow at this point. Thank you!
Stow has no “glob for target” option, so you can’t do *.profile.
You could write a script that, when you’re deploying a stow, symlinks the profile into the right location. You’d have to remember to run it in the future so create a README file and include the instructions.
You mean write a script with something like
findfollowed bystow --target=/path/to/profile/folder firefox?Yeah, exactly. You could glob with find to locate the directory, store the path in a variable and then pass that to stow.
I’m not sure what you have to do to make Firefox acknowledge the profile, but I believe it simply enumerates all of the folders in the directory and displays all that are valid (but definitely double check on that first).