Dotfiles

These are the dotfiles that I use. I manage them with GNU Stow.

Example usage

See https://github.com/xero/dotfiles#how-it-works. The dotfiles here also make use of a .stowrc file to be read by stow (see man stow.8).

List unstowed dotfiles

There is no easy way to list unstowed (dotfile) packages (as far as I know). Assuming your dotfiles are installed to ~/dotfiles/, the following command can give you an idea of which dotfile packages are unstowed:

find ~/dotfiles -maxdepth 1 ! -path ~/dotfiles ! -path '*/.git' -type d -printf '%f\0' \
    | xargs -0r stow -nd ~/dotfiles -v --dotfiles

This command does the following:

• Get all non-git directories in ~/dotfiles as a null-delimited list. Null is used as a delimiter since it is unlikely a directory name contains null characters. We assume that each one of these directories is a dotfile package.
• Use xargs to input this list of dotfile packages to a dry, verbose run of stow. The reasoning behind this is as follows:
  • Stowing an unstowed package will result in verbose output with names of the relevant dotfiles being stowed.
  • We only want to list unstowed dotfiles instead of actually stowing them, so we dry run with the -n option.

Unstowed dotfiles will be listed by lines starting with LINK:. The --dotfiles option from .stowrc is necessary above because .stowrc is only read if stow is ran in the same directory as this rc file.

See man find.1, man xargs.1, and man stow.8 for more information.