[arch-general] How to safe configs to another path than ~

[Jörg Tobias Borgert]

On 25.07.2013 11:33, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>         -------- Cancelled posting --------
>                 On Thu, 2013-07-25 at 18:46 +1000, Gaetan Bisson wrote:
>                 > Applications have different means of finding out what the HOME directory
>                 > of a given user is. The HOME environment variable is just one of them.
>                 > Other popular ones include the function calls getpwuid() and getpwuid();
>                 > they basically read the data from /etc/passwd so your only way to work
>                 > around that and pretend having a different home directory would be to
>                 > override those calls with LD_PRELOAD...
>                 
>                 Thank you Gaetan,
>                 
>                 but this fails too:
>                 
>                 $ LD_PRELOAD=/home/rocketmouse/alt_profiles/1/ /usr/bin/xfce4-terminal
>                 ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/rocketmouse/alt_profiles/1/' from LD_PRELOAD
>                 cannot be preloaded: ignored.
>                 
>                 Regards,
>                 Ralf
>         -------- End of cancelled posting --------
> 
> Assumed I would be able to do it, then I need to write new calls that
> will replace those calls?
>         
> 

Maybe my suggestion produces some major drawbacks that I don't recognize
at the moment, but couldn't you just use symlinks for the conf files &
dirs and change those symlinks' targets via scripts if you want to use a
different configuration? Or make /home/yourusername a symlink to the
home directory you want to use at the moment?