Seems that the de facto approach is to backup-rm-symlink. My approach is to source from existing configs whenever possible. Specifically, instead of mv ~/.ba

Seems that the de facto approach is to backup-rm-symlink. My approach is to source from existing configs whenever possible. Specifically, instead of mv ~/.bashrc ~/.bashrc.bak; ln -s $DOTFILES_PATH/.bashrc ~/.bashrc I do a slightly more sophisticated version of: echo "source $DOTFILES_PATH/.bashrc" >> ~/.bashrc (The sophistication comes in checking if that line already exists.) Here's my install script: https://github.com/shazow/dotfiles/blob/master/install.sh https://github.com/shazow/dotfiles/blob/master/install.sh I've found many benefits in this, such as easily having machine-specific configuration side by side with my unified dotfiles and no backup clutter. This works especially well for things like vim configs, too. $ cat ~/.vimrc source $DOTFILES_PATH/.vimrc