Precedence of .chezmoiremove vs. exact_ attributes? about chezmoi HOT 2 CLOSED

Thanks for spotting this. This is an interesting case of non-orthogonality in chezmoi.

The tl;dr is that .chezmoiremove is a separate system to chezmoi's source state and they don't interact well. Use the remove_ attribute on the directory instead.

Note that this is not specific to exact_ directories, so I'll ignore exact_.

In a sense, the configuration that you have is inconsistent: it states that foo and foo/bar should exist (because they are present in the source state) and also that foo should be removes. The reason that chezmoi does not detect the inconsistency is because chezmoi's order of operations is roughly:

1. Read the source state.
2. Make a list of files and directories that match any .chezmoiremove lines.
3. Apply the source state.
4. Remove the files and directories found in stage 2.

In your case, foo does not exist at stage 2, so it is not added to the list, and therefore created in stage 3 and not removed in stage 4.

Instead, use the remove_ attribute on foo, which will tell chezmoi to remove the directory if it is empty.

from chezmoi.

Hopefully this is now resolved. Please re-open if needed.

from chezmoi.