Unable to work effectively with Git locally

Question

Please, see Greg\'s answer.

I do not understand Daniel\'s statement at the thread completely:

Why are you manually copying files around

Answer 1

1) I back up my .dotfiles as follows:

a) Create a directory ~/dotfiles

b) link dotfile into ~/dotfiles/ e.g.

ln ~/.bashrc ~/dotfiles/.bashrc  # NB Must be hard links

c)

cd ~/dotfiles
git init
git add .  
git commit -m "Initial commit of dotfiles"

2) You can also refer to a Git repo not in the current directory tree by exporting the environment string GIT_DIR .e.g (assuming at repo at ~/myrepos/repo1)

a)

 export GIT_DIR=~/myrepos/repo1/.git

b)

 git add .profile  
 git commit -m "added .profile"

Does that help at all?