Hi again 👋
Today I want to write about the problem that I recently had that I solved after a few
hours of searching google. It may help others so I write a post about it.
Problem
For managing my dotfiles I'm using
stow. It works great for my use case - symlinking
folders from my dotfiles to actual place that they are needed. Yet recently I decided
to split my dotfiles into two: public and private.
The problem was that after a split I cannot easily use stow fish
from my private dotfiles because
I got an error that this directory is already used by stow.
Stow folding problem
It turns out that stow is doing something called folding
. It means that it is
symlinking whole folder instead of individual files. So stow fish
will create
folder symlink and that is why I cannot symlink other files to the same location.
Solution
Yet stow has an interesting flag --no-folding
which called while stowing folder:
stow fish --no-folding
. Because of this stow won't symlink folders but files
inside folders. Thanks to that I can have two dotfiles with the same fish folder
but with different files.
Summary & TL;DR
If you want to symlink the same two directories from different stow folders you can
use --no-folding
flag.
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