for loop and symlinking dotfiles

Asked Jun 01 '20 at 16:05

Active Jun 01 '20 at 16:14

Viewed 137 times

I am trying to read through dotfile repos in order to learn how to maintain my own dotfiles. Here is an example that I am looking at:

pushd homedir > /dev/null 2>&1

for file in .*; do
  if [[ $file == "." || $file == ".." ]]; then
    continue
  fi

  # make backup
  # ...
  # ...

  # create the new link
  ln -s ~/.dotfiles/homedir/$file ~/$file
  echo -en '\tlinked';ok
done

popd > /dev/null 2>&1

Why is .* used to iterate over the files in homedir.
Is the following if-statement necessary account for the fact that .* expands to . and .. and therefore would include files outside of working dir?

edited Jun 01 '20 at 16:14

oguz ismail

asked Jun 01 '20 at 16:05

molleweide

1

1. The `.*` glob matches dot files (`.` followed by anything). 2. The `ln` command would fail on `.` and `..`, since those already exist in every directory. – chash Jun 01 '20 at 16:22
aaaahaa! thank you very much. – molleweide Jun 01 '20 at 17:03

for loop and symlinking dotfiles

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