this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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Okay, so I've been reading about dotfile management apps such as GNU Stow, and I love the idea. I have a good grasp on how it works. Seems like it should work flawlessly for corralling all my dotfiles into one folder so I can easily clone them across machines. Makes sense for apps whose config folders and files are named something static like ~/.config/appname/settings.conf.

That said, can somebody help me understand the cloning/syncing workflow for apps that generate folders and/or files with dynamic/random/inconsistent names? For example, I'm thinking of Firefox, which creates folders with seemingly random strings for each profile.

Do I just need to clone my Firefox profiles before I launch Firefox for the first time on a new machine? Can I configure GNU Stow w/ something like *.Profile for the top level folder name? Am I doomed to manually syncing my Firefox settings, or is there some other trick for handling these dynamically named configs that I haven't come across in the tutorials yet? This little cliff hanger is pretty much the last thing stopping me from installing GNU Stow at this point. Thank you!

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[–] giddy@quokk.au 1 points 2 days ago

UPDATE - looks like chezmoi MIGHT handle this https://www.chezmoi.io/reference/templates/functions/mozillaInstallHash/. Haven't found a working example of it in use though