stow: No packages to stow or unstow The following command works: % pwd /home/ismail/.dotfiles/.common-dotfiles % stow --target=/home/ismail/.dotfiles/test . But the following command does not work: stow --target=/home/ismail/.dotfiles/test --dir=/home/ismail/.dotfiles/.common-dotfiles It gives error: stow: No packages to stow or unstow How can I give the link of source in stow (instead of using .)?

When stowing, you still need to specify what to stow or unstow. With the `--dir` and `--target` options, all you're doing is to tell `stow` where packages are to be found and where they are to be linked to, but you don't tell it what to do.

In your case, either of these would work:


stow --target="$HOME/.dotfiles/test" --dir="$HOME/.dotfiles/.common-dotfiles" .



stow --target="$HOME/.dotfiles/test" --dir="$HOME/.dotfiles" .common-dotfiles


(I would personally prefer the second option as it refers to `.common-dotfiles` as the package to stow from `"$HOME/.dotfiles"`, while the first variation refers to `"$HOME/.dotfiles/.common-dotfiles"` as the directory containing packages.)

You can also explicitly tell `stow` that you want to stow a particular package with `--stow` (or `-S`):


stow --target="$HOME/.dotfiles/test" --dir="$HOME/.dotfiles" --stow .common-dotfiles