There was a recent post by Martin Meredith asking about dotfile management.

This inspired me to put together a simple hack which allows several operations to be carried out:

dotfile-manager update [directory]

Update the contents of the named directory to the most recent version, via "hg pull" or HTTP fetch.

This could be trivially updated to allow git/subversion/CVS to be used instead.

(directory defaults to ~/.dotfiles/ if not specified.)

dotfile-manager link [directory]

For each file in the named directory link _foo to ~/.foo.

(directory defaults to ~/.dotfiles/ if not specified.)

e.g. directory/_screenrc will be linked to from ~/.screenrc. But hostnames count too! So you can create directory/_screenrc.gold and that will be the target of ~/.screenrc on the host gold.my.flat

dotfile-manager tidy

This removes any dangling ~/.* symlinks.

dotfile-manager report

Report on any file ~/.* which isn't a symlink - those files might be added in the future.

Right now that lets me update my own dotfiles via:

dotfile-manager update ~/.dotfiles
dotfile-manager update ~/.dotfiles-private

dotfile-manager link ~/.dotfiles
dotfile-manager link ~/.dotfiles-private

It could be updated a little more, but it already supports profiles - if you assume "profile" means "input directory".

To be honest it probably needs to be perlified, rather than being hoky shell script. But otherwise I can see it being useful - much more so than my existing solution which is ~/.dotfiles/fixup.sh inside my dotfiles repository.

ObFilm: Forever Knight

Tags: dotfile-manager, dotfiles, tools, utilities | 5 comments