Re: [Help-stow] Stow directory and subdirectory

[Adam Spiers]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 11:04:05AM -0600, Junchen Gu wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just started to use stow today and thanks for making this awesome tool!

:-)

> After playing around with it, I got it to work but I have two questions:
>
> 1. It seems that stow only applies to package directory, not
> individual executable.

Correct.

> I have installed several tools where there is
> only one executable I want to stow in the package directory among many
> other files. If I stow the package directory, everything will be
> stowed, which is not what I want. Is there or will there be a function
> to only select executables based on their names? I know the ignore
> list function but when there is only one or two executables I want,
> it's much harder to ignore many things than picking up a few.

Well, stow was born as a sort of package manager, so this usage
pattern was never really the intent.  If you only have one or two
executables to stow, why not just run "ln -s" manually?  The point of
stow is to manage whole farms of symlinks, where running "ln -s"
manually would be too cumbersome.  Having said that, I'd happily
*consider* pull requests adding support for this, but first I'd still
need a bit of convincing that it's worthwhile.

> 2. In the GNU manual page
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/manual/stow.html), it says " If a
> new subdirectory is encountered whilst stowing a new package, the
> subdirectory is created within the target, and its contents are
> symlinked, rather than just creating a symlink for the directory" I
> can see this happen where the executables in the subdirectory (/bin)
> can be invoked when I only have the target directory in the $PATH.
> However, I don't understand why in the terminal, I can only see
> subdirectory symlinks but not actual executable symlinks?

I'm not sure I follow.  Please could you paste the exact stow commands
you used, together with their output, and also the same for running
"ls -l" on the directories in question?