stow: Not just for package management any more

GNU stow is another one of those projects that took me a while to wrap my head around, but once I saw it in action, it made perfect sense. Of course, given that stow doesn’t really show any output, that statement is ironic on another level.

As I understand it, stow is intended as a kind of package manager for software you might build locally — which in my case, is quite a lot. stow works by creating symlinks from a program’s original location to a central depot of your creation.

The idea is that this reduces the chances of unforeseen conflicts, and makes managing random, scattered files easier, since most everything is in the same place. One program, one folder, and appropriate symlinks elsewhere in the system.

If that doesn’t make a lot of sense, don’t worry, because two hours before I wrote this, I was trying to wrap my head around it too. Now though, I think I see the value in it.

What clued me in was this post by Brandon Invergo, where he talks about creating a folder specifically for dotfiles with stow. Brandon is an easy read and he gives you a good visual illustration, so don’t worry if you’re not a fan of reading from blogs. Neither am I (ironic, isn’t it?).

If you step through his post, you’ll end up with a small tree of folders with the dotfiles of each program nested individually. Your home folder will still hold links to those files, and everything will still work as it should. So don’t panic. 😉

I tested it with two programs that I thought more or less bulletproof, even if my configurations were utterly vaporized: htop and snownews. And after Brandon’s instructions, wouldn’t you know it, everything worked fine.

Why would I want to do this? Well, like Brandon explains, this makes it much cleaner to synchronize your dotfiles against an online repository — for example, you can more conveniently dump your dotfiles on github. No more cherrypicking files and sending them singly.

But personally, I usually have a lump of folders and settings that I transfer between machines, to expedite setup or testing. Even just in the past two or three days, I’ve ended up manually copying files from one machine to another, and from that machine to a third. In the future, I expect I can install stow, rsync the dotfiles folder to the new machine and jump right in.

I suppose you could do this manually, file by file and link by link, and not need stow. But just thinking about that should make it obvious why stow is a good tool: Manually setting up all those links would be tedious to say the least.

I have the reassurance of Brandon and some other sites that even if you uninstall stow, your link systems will continue to work. That makes sense to me, even if I haven’t taken that step yet.

stow has the potential to be a game changer for you, if you need that kind of added flexibility with packages or with your personal configuration files. It won’t clean up your home directory — you’ll end up with just as many symlinks as you had configuration files, and in the same place — but it adds a layer of convenience that you might find immediately attractive.

linkchecker: Relax your mouse clicker finger

I seem to be on an Internet-based kick these days. It started yesterday with httpry and html-xml-utils; now I’m on to linkchecker, which cascades through pages or sites and checks that the links are … linking.

linkchecker came at a good time, since I got an e-mail a week or so ago, mentioning (not really complaining, just mentioning) that most of the software I touch on seems to have been around for quite a while. The suggestion was, “When are you going to show us some fresh stuff?”

Well, linkchecker has updates within the past few days, and I’d bet wummel is working on it even as you’re reading this. How’s that for fresh? 😈

What linkchecker does and how is probably obvious just from the name, without looking at the screenshot. And of course, you should probably be careful where you aim linkchecker, because as you can see, it had stacked up several thousand links to check within only a minute or two of looking at this page.

Perhaps it would be better kept in-house first, before turning it loose in the wild. 😐

linkchecker has a long, long list of options for you to look over, in case you want to check external URLs (gasp!), use customized configuration files or filter out URLs by regex. Or a lot of other things.

Perhaps the greatest part about using linkchecker though, is that it allows you to relax your mouse clicker finger, and do other things. Interns everywhere will rejoice. 😉

And just for the record, without any snarky undertones, I do have a tendency to pull in a lot of old, or outdated software. If it still works, I’m still willing to use it. I hope you feel the same. 😕

ln: Your magical shortcut tool

ln is another magic toy from coreutils, which is where all the good stuff is in Linux. ln creates links, which you can use to make cool stuff happen.

I don’t use a hefty lot of links in my personal directory, but I can tell you about a few times when I’ve used ln for fun and profit.

For example, I don’t use an automounting daemon or a desktop environment that will automatically mount drives or volumes.

Instead, I include them in /etc/fstab, and mount them to /media, like a true Internet superhero.

To save myself time typing out the path to the mountpoint, I use

ln -s /media/sdb1

from my home directory, which creates the symbolic link locally, for convenience. Best of all, I can issue the mount command directly, and it works fine.

mount sdb1

I also use ln to point to the most recent version of some financial files. I have some spreadsheets that increment on a monthly basis, but retain the date as part of the filename.

This makes them a little cumbersome to load, even with tab completion.

2013-07-01-finances.sc
2013-08-01-finances.sc
2013-09-01-finances.sc

Rather than type out the date each time or fumble through tab completion to get the right month and day, I make a new link with ln whenever the newest file is created.

ln -s /home/kmandla/data/2013-10-01-finances.sc /home/kmandla/data/finances

Now I can open that link from within an application and the correct file bounces into view.

ln is good fun and there are a lot of other nifty tricks you can do with it. It’s worth experimenting with this, and in some cases it might be preferable to use a link over a fast directory switcher (like j2 or fasd), if your needs just aren’t that great.

Enjoy. 😉