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A comment on Unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub. Parent comment

Re:Unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub by pmoriarty on Saturday December 12, 2015 @12:19PM (#10723383)
With this stow solution, I wonder what happens when some program makes modifications directly to its own configuration files, without being aware that they're not directly under your home directory but symlinked under dotfiles somewhere. Will the symlinked file get modified? Or will the symlink be removed completely and a new file be put in its place, directly under your home directory and not under your stow directory at all.

One program which I'm thinking of that can make modifications of its own config files is znc. weechat is another. There might be some other random program that does this too. I'm concerned that using stow for them might lead to disaster.

Any advice from someone who's tried it with apps like that?

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Re:Unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub by iokanuon on Saturday December 12, 2015 @02:08PM (#10723750)
Why wouldn't it work? You can write to a symlink.

    $ touch file
    $ ln -s file symlink
    $ echo text > symlink
    $ cat file
    text
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Re:Unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub by 3onyc on Saturday December 12, 2015 @02:16PM (#10723778)
Some applications write to a temp file and then move that over the old file.

One way to work around this is to symlink the entire directory.

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