Working around symlinks

[dgudim]

I wanted to move my .config and .cache to a faster nvme drive.

The first logical action was to move the directory over to the new drive and symlink it back, so I did.
But chezmoi was not particularly happy with that, the symlinks got treated as symlinks and not directories (duh) and chezmoi prompted me with this:

diff --git a/.config b/.config
old mode 100000
new mode 40755
index df5c7ebe0b7ba9ce6b7b05a5c416412dcbfd7bb5..e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391
--- a/.config
+++ b/.config
@@ -1 +0,0 @@
-/mnt/fast_storage/FAST_CONFIG
\ No newline at end of file

Soooo, it wanted to overwrite the symlink with a real directory, I needed a different solution.

Bind mounts to the rescue!

I remembered that on linux there is such thing as a bind mount, which basically allows to mount a directory as if it was a drive!

So I went and added 2 lines to my fstab:

/mnt/fast_storage/FAST_CONFIG/  /home/kloud/.config/          none    defaults,bind   0 0
/mnt/fast_storage/FAST_CACHE/   /home/kloud/.cache/           none    defaults,bind   0 0

Now I am happy and chezmoi is happy 😎.

Maybe this helps someone.

[twpayne]

Very neat, thanks for sharing :)

[halostatue]

Windows users may be able to achieve similar behaviour using junction points, and on macOS using diskutil mount -mountPoint may help — but these may require a drive, not a directory. Further exploration by motivated parties would be welcome on this.

[Lockszmith-GH]

PowerShell command to create the junction point:

New-Item -Type Junction -Value 'Target\Path' .\sym-link-name