Preserve dotfiles inside nested directories

[pol-rivero]

I have some dotfiles that look like this: ~/dir/.some-config, but I haven't been able to figure out how to add those files to RCM.
If I add the file as ~/.dotfiles/dir/.some-config, rcup ignores the file since it starts with a dot, but if I add it as ~/.dotfiles/dir/some-config, it gets installed as ~/dir/some-config instead of ~/dir/.some-config.

I know I could use a hook to rename these files, but this seems like a very basic and common use case, so I must be missing something. How would you accomplish this?

[pol-rivero]

I thought I would share the post-up hook I used to work around this issue, for future reference in case somebody else has this issue.

In my dotfiles, I add an underscore before the dot so it's not ignored by RCM, like this: ~/.dotfiles/dir/_.some-config. First, rcup creates the symlink ~/dir/_.some-config, and then this hook renames the links to remove the underscore.

It also works with nested directories (~/aa/_.bb/_.cc/dd.txt -> ~/aa/.bb/.cc/dd.txt), so you should make sure your home directory (or its subdirectories, recursively) doesn't have unexpected directories that start with _..

~/.dotfiles/hooks/post-up/01.rename-underscore-dot-files.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Rename symbolic from _.* to .* to work around RCM limitations

find $HOME -maxdepth 15 -type l -name '_.*' | while read link; do
  target=$(readlink "$link")
  [[ "$target" == $HOME/.dotfiles* ]] && mv "$link" "${link/_./.}"
done

# Do the same with nested directories

find $HOME -depth -maxdepth 15 -type d -name '_.*' -not -path "$HOME/.dotfiles/*" | while read dir; do
  new_dir="${dir%/*}/${dir##*/_}"

  if [ -d "$new_dir" ]; then
    # Merge into existing directory https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/127713
    rsync -a --remove-source-files "$dir/" "$new_dir/"
    find "$dir" -depth -type d -exec rmdir {} +
  else
    mv "$dir" "$new_dir"
  fi
done

You may also be interested in this hook to remove broken links (for example, when renaming a file in the dotfiles directory).

~/.dotfiles/hooks/post-up/02.remove-dead-links.sh

#!/bin/bash

find $HOME -depth -maxdepth 15 -type l | while read link; do
  if [ ! -e "$link" ]; then
    target=$(readlink "$link")
    [[ "$target" == $HOME/.dotfiles* ]] && rm "$link"
  fi
done

[jest]

It's "by design", described in the tutorial, https://thoughtbot.github.io/rcm/rcm.7.html#COMMON_PROBLEM:_DOTTED_FILENAMES_IN_DOTFILES_DIRECTORY, so I guess not a big chance to get "fixed"...

[pol-rivero]

@jest I see. Well, this is not a problem anymore, I ended up writing my own dotfiles manager.
I'll leave it here in case someone else is interested: https://github.com/pol-rivero/doot. It's designed to be as easy to use as RCM but way faster and more customizable.