Running update from cron and not overwriting local changes?

[adamshand]

Hello,

I've been using chezmoi for a while, really makes life easier ... thank you!

I'd like to run chezmoi update nightly on all my servers to make sure they always have the latest version of files. However if there are local changes I'd like them to be skipped, so I don't risk losing something useful.

This seems like it should be easy, but I can't figure out how to do this. I assume I'm missing something obvious? Any pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks again,
Adam.

[twpayne]

You can use the first character of each column of the output of chezmoi status. If any of these characters are not a space then that entry has been modified since chezmoi last wrote it.

[adamshand]

Thanks for the reply, but sorry I don't understand.

When I run chezmoi update interactively, it prompts me if a local file has been edited and asks if I want to skip updating the local file from github or overwrite the local file from github.

I'm wanting to run chezmoi update from cron and have it skip any locally updated files.

How does the first column of chezmoi status help?

[twpayne]

You can write a script that calls chezmoi status and then calls chezmoi apply if there are no columns with a non-space in the first column.

[adamshand]

Got it, thank you!

In case it's helpful to anyone else, here's a (lightly tested) script for updating dotfiles without overwriting any files with local changes.

#!/bin/bash

echo "## Pulling latest from GitHub"
chezmoi git pull

# get a list of files to update that don't have local changes
FILES=$(chezmoi status | awk '/^ / {print $2}')

echo -e "\n## Updating files without local changes"

for f in $FILES; do
  echo "... $f"
  chezmoi apply ~/${f}
done

echo -e "\n## Files with local changes that need adding"
chezmoi status 1>&2