Lesson 6: Hardcoded Developer Machine Paths¶

File affected: scripts/actions/menu-aesthetics.sh Severity: High — feature is completely broken on any machine other than the developer's

What Happened¶

The theme picker listed themes with a path hardcoded to the developer's own machine:

theme_choice=$(ls /media/naranyala/Data/projects-remote/labwc-fuzzel-zigshell-cairo-pango/themes/*.ini \
    | xargs -n 1 basename -s .ini \
        | fuzzel -d -p "Theme > " -w 30 -l 12)

On any other system — or even on the same machine after the repo is cloned to a different directory — this path doesn't exist. The ls fails silently, fuzzel gets empty input, and the theme picker shows nothing.

The Fix¶

Use a fallback chain that checks standard installed locations first, then falls back to script-relative paths for development use:

_script_dir="$(cd "$(dirname "$0")" && pwd)"
_themes_dir=""
for _candidate in \
    "$HOME/.local/share/ocws/themes" \
    "$HOME/.config/ocws/themes" \
    "$_script_dir/../../themes" \
    "$_script_dir/../../../themes"
do
    if [[ -d "$_candidate" ]]; then
        _themes_dir="$_candidate"
        break
    fi
done

if [[ -z "$_themes_dir" ]]; then
    notify-send "Themes Not Found" "Could not locate a themes directory." -t 3000
else
    theme_choice=$(ls "$_themes_dir"/*.ini 2>/dev/null \
        | xargs -n 1 basename -s .ini \
    | fuzzel -d -p "Theme > " -w 30 -l 12)
fi

The General Rule¶

Never hardcode absolute paths that include your username, home directory layout, or project clone location. Use $HOME, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, BASH_SOURCE[0]- relative paths, or a documented environment variable instead.

Instead of	Use
`/home/naranyala/...`	`$HOME/...`
`/media/naranyala/Data/projects/...`	`$SCRIPT_DIR/../../...` relative to `BASH_SOURCE[0]`
Hardcoded config path	`${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/...`
Hardcoded data path	`${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/...`

Standard XDG Paths for OCWS¶

OCWS_CONFIG="${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/ocws"
OCWS_DATA="${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/ocws"
OCWS_THEMES="$OCWS_DATA/themes"
OCWS_PLUGINS="$OCWS_CONFIG/plugins"

Using these consistently means the project works on any machine with any username and any home directory layout, including systems where $HOME is not under /home.

How to Catch It¶

Grep for absolute paths that contain a username or project-specific mount point:

grep -rn '/media/\|/home/[a-z]\|/Users/' scripts/ dotfiles/ --include="*.sh"

Any hit is a candidate for replacement with a dynamic path.