Bash script to symlink configuration files from git repo into home directory

Question

My goals are to:

1. Do it automatically (without adding a line to my script every time I add or change the location of a config file)
2. The files in the git repo folder should not be hidden, but the symlinks in my home directory should
3. Existing files of the same name should be overwritten, but not directories. For example if I have config/conf.txt in my dotfiles repo, it shouldn't overwrite the entire ~/.config folder, but simply add a link to conf.txt inside ~/.config.

My current solution does these, but it could probably be done better:

DOTFILES_DIR="$HOME/dotfiles"

echo -n Creating symlinks...

shopt -s extglob nocaseglob

# Create hidden symlinks, hard link them to $HOME, rm old symlinks
for dotfile in $DOTFILES_DIR/!(readme*|${0##*/}); do
    hidden="$DOTFILES_DIR/.${dotfile##*/}"
    cp -asf "$dotfile" "$hidden"
    cp -alf "$hidden" "$HOME"
    rm -r "$hidden"
done

echo done

I think I should be able to copy the files directly to the home directory, but I had some trouble getting that to work right if a destination folder already existed.

Edit: I was able to eliminate the second for loop. Much better. There may still be a better way, though.

Answer 1

Instead of symlinks I would probably arrange for

$ make -C $HOME/dotfiles  refresh

to perform some name mangling and rsync -av copying, or perhaps create simpler symlinks without a "hidden" layer. But you've chosen your favorite approach, so we'll go down that path.

---

Habitually add these suggested double quotes, please, to control globbing:

for dotfile in "$DOTFILES_DIR"/!(readme*|${0##*/}); do

(Yes, I know, the source makes it a constant with no SPACE if $HOME lacks whitespace. It's just a good habit to have.)

---

There seems to be more than one file-copying case covered by this code. The cp; cp; rm approach you've chosen is non-intuitive. I would not be willing to maintain this codebase as presented. An alternate design would use find $DIR -type f plus a pipeline which mangles filenames and performs any needed copying.

More # comments on the cp flag behavior might help. Automated unit test(s) that demonstrate the code's behavior would definitely help. For example, it could show what happens when conf.txt was present for a while, and then is removed from the dotfiles repo.