I used GNU Stow for a several years and always found it difficult to tell what symlinks were actually being created, even in verbose mode.

When I also ran into the stow bug with --dotfiles , I gave up on stow and wrote fling ( https://github.com/bbkane/fling ), which works quite similarly, but prints out what symlinks it plans to create and asks for confirmation before making them. Being written in Go, fling is also easy to install on Windows, which has come in real handy on occasion.