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Comment by LukaD | Hacker News Reader

This is how I manage my dotfiles since I discovered stow a couple of months ago.

The only thing that bugs me is that I haven't figured out an elegant way to have some configs include machine specific configs. For example a set of bash aliases that I only use at work but don't want at home.

My best idea is to source all files in, say ~/.bashrc.d and put machine specific configs in there... Haven't tried it out yet.

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I also use stow to manage my common personal dotfiles, as well as my employer-specific dtofiles. The way I do this is to keep my general files in my dotfiles repository, but then keep work specific ones in a separate repo (dotfiles-employer).

This separate repo has .private versions of all of my commonly used dotfiles (for example .bashrc.private), and my top-level files will check for the existence and source these, if present.

Both repos will be installed using stow, with the work dotfiles generally just extending the personal dotfiles.

Not sure if this would work with Stow, but in my .bashrc I just do this:

  if [ -f ~/config/bashrc_$(hostname -s) ]; then
        source ~/config/bashrc_$(hostname -s)
  fi

this gives me machine specific configs.

You can do something similar to target *nix platforms like Darwin|FreeBSD|Linux|NetBSD|OpenBSD with:

  if [ -f ~/config/bashrc_$(uname -s) ]; then
      source ~/config/bashrc_$(uname -s)
  fi

Great idea! It wouldn't work for me though as I tend to call all my machines 'fuckup' (I know...) ;)

In that case, you could have it read or check the existence of something else, like a file in /etc.

> My best idea is to source all files in, say ~/.bashrc.d and put machine specific configs in there... Haven't tried it out yet.

A fair amount of the time when I'm setting up a .foorc, I'll want to add some functions to bashrc, or change a MANPATH or something, so this pattern is useful for that too; you could just have a ~/dotfiles/.bashrc.d/foo.sh and have your .bashrc unconditionally source everything in ~/.bashrc.d/. Then when you use stow to setup foo, its bashrc modifications get installed too.

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