I always wanted to manage the files in my home directory. Generally, it's a complete mess and I wanted to get things right and understand the files I had.

At first, I just created a simple shell script that maintained symbolic links of the dotfiles and dordirs of my homedirs to .local/config, sort of early XDG configuration directory. I also changed my .bashrc and later .zshrc to point to files in .local/etc/profile.d. The shell script was reading a database in .local/config/database.sh that contained the link information in the form.

The script did the following for each file declared:

• if the file existed in the homedir but not in the database directory, it was simply moved and a link was created in its place.
• if the file existed at both places, tell there is a conflict.
• if the file existed in the database directory but not in the homedir, create the link

The database looks like:

link ".bashrc" "bashrc"
link ".zshrc"  "zshrc"

# First file in home directory
# Second file in .local/config

My script just defined a function link and sourced the database. But links were not easy to construct in shell. So later, I decided to rewrite it in Tcl, simply because the syntax is compatible (I love the Tcl syntax for that) and because of the wonderful file command.

Later, I improved the script that was then called fixdir to list which files were not managed, and display them. So I could either delete those files (because I don't care about them) or integrate them in the database. The script gained a clean command to automatically remove files declared as noisy.

Now, I have a slightly different problem. I have now different computers which do not have all the same configuration. At first, I synchronized everything and just used the hostname in the database to get different links depending on the machine. But now, with my computer at work, I will not synchronize all the personal configurations. i have to get to a modular approach.

And this script did not help me in tracking what programs I installed in ~/.local/{bin,share,lib}. For this, I wanted something like stow. I tried using stow, but it failed with a conflict. Then I tried using homedir. I just didn't like it because it created an ugly ~/bin instead of ~/.local/bin.

Then I realized my fixdir script looks much like homedir already, and I patched it up to make it better. And there it is.

The current version of fixdir is on github.

Let me copy the README file:

What is it?

This is my homedir package manager. Written first in shell then translated in tcl. Originally, this was just to maintain a set of symbolic links from my home directory to a directory where all important comfig files were stored. Then I decided to make it a package manager.

How to install it?

git clone git://github.com/mildred/fixdir.git fixdir
fixdir_dir="$(pwd)/fixdir"
cd
"$fixdir_dir/fixdir" install "$fixdir_dir/hpkg.tcl"

fixdir is installed in ~/.local/bin. Make sure it is in your $PATH.

How does it work

fixdir works better when you are in your target directory (homedir)

Invoke one action with a database file. The database file is a tcl script that contain all files and directories that should be linked.

What else can it do?

fixdir unknown list all files not manages by fixdir in the current directory

fixdir clean remove files declared as noisy

Bugs

• fixdir list doesn't work when pwd != target directory