To reiterate, the --no-folding flag prevents creation of symlinked directories, and it really should be the default behavior.

I don't blame you for not knowing about this flag. Here's its description in the manpage:

> Disable folding of newly stowed directories when stowing, and refolding of newly foldable directories when unstowing.

This is confusing because it's a circular definition. It doesn't explain what "folding" means. It should just read, "prevents creation of symlinked directories" or something.

Problem is, this still makes sense in some cases but doesn't in others, and stow, as it is, doesn't care about the distinction.

For example, on a machine where ~/.config/autostart/ doesn't still exist, I do not want that either ~/.config or ~/.config/autostart are created as symlinks to my stowed package; otherwise any newly installed file, from unrelated apps, would end up in my package! I just want this path to exist as a proper dir, and only contain whatever symlinks are needed from stow. Thus an `mkdir -p` is still needed before running stow.

On the other hand, I do want that ~/.config/wireshark/ is a symlink to the stow repository. So no mkdir in this case.

Regardless, having a script that adds extra per-package pre-process/post-process logic before/after running stow is still needed, anyway.

I use this too but every other time I come back to it I have to really read through the docs to figure stuff out. That’s just me not writing very useful notes though -_-

When I did the setup I kept the commands I used in a Makefile. In theory, running `make` should do all the setup for me on a new machine.

Use the --no-folding flag to prevent stow from linking directories.