03/11/05: Stow

I never realised how useful this program is. I have been playing with CVS emacs and various version of mplayer. Stow makes it easy to juggle between different version of the same program.

Put the following in your .bashrc:

function stow
{
command stow --dir=$HOME/local/stow $*
}

function unstow
{
command stow --dir=$HOME/local/stow -D $*
}

Here is how to stow mplayer:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/local/stow/mplayer107
make
make install
stow mplayer107

Note that mplayer is neatly tucked in it's own directory. Stow creates a symlink to mplayer at ~/local/bin/mplayer so you need to only have ~/local/bin in your path.

Say that you compiled an earlier version of mplayer 106, switching from one version to the other is very easy:

unstow mplayer107
stow mplayer106

I hope I have convinced you that using stow is a good idea, installing different software in the same location becomes unmanageable.

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