Configuration file sharing

Store your files in a repository.
Checkout it on any machine.
Create and maintain symlinks to these files easily.

How it works

Actual files are stored in directories with names matching the %VAR_NAME% pattern. The part between the percent signs is the name of an environment variable. Every file in such directory gets a symlink in the directory pointed to by the environment variable. Directory hierarchies are preserved.

A database of symlinks is maintained in case a shared file is deleted (the corresponding symlink is then deleted too). The default database file name is "links.bin", maintained in the top-level directory with shared files.

This description is obviously confusing; see the complete usage example below.

Usage

Symlinks are managed by update.sh.

usage: update.sh [-h|--help] [-d|--database PATH] [-s|--shared-dir DIR] [-n|--dry-run]

Pass the --help flag to this script to examine its detailed usage information.

A complete usage example is given below. In this example, the symlinks to files in "../src" must appear in "/test/dest".

> tree /test/dest/
/test/dest/

0 directories, 0 files

> tree ../src/
../src/
└── %DEST%
    ├── a
    │   └── b
    │       └── c
    │           └── test.txt
    └── foo
        └── bar
            └── baz

6 directories, 2 files

> echo "$DEST"
/test/dest

> ./update.sh --shared-dir ../src/
...

> tree /test/dest/
/test/dest/
├── a
│   └── b
│       └── c
│           └── test.txt -> /cygdrive/d/workspace/personal/src/%DEST%/a/b/c/test.txt
└── foo
    └── bar
        └── baz -> /cygdrive/d/workspace/personal/src/%DEST%/foo/bar/baz

5 directories, 2 files

For more realistic usage examples, see

my Linux/Cygwin environment,
configuration files for various Windows apps.

Limitations

Variable names must be alphanumeric. More precisely, the corresponding directory names must match the ^%[_[:alpha:]][_[:alnum:]]*%$ regular expression. Consequently, ProgramFiles(x86) (and other weird variable names Windows allows) are not supported.

A special variable name CONFIG_LINKS_ROOT is resolved to the root path, "/".

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt for details.