So I\’m blowing away, and re-installing, my Steam Bottle on Codeweaver\’s Crossover games. I was hoping to get some in-game overlay support for the Community/Friends features of Steam. I really really want to hang on to Team Fortress/Left 4 Dead settings though.

Using the find command we can solve this problem fairly easy.

So the basic requirements in this scenario boil down to finding all the config files under the ~/.cxgames tree. I have an ~/etc directory to keep a backup of important things such as settings and handy scripts. I will copy my tar file to the ~/etc directory so I can find it easily later. However, I don’t want every *.cfg file under my Steam bottle, just the ones for those specific games (Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead). When I run the following command, I\’ll discover those games have a common top-level directory, ~/.cxgames/Steam/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps.

find ~/.cxgames -name "*.cfg"

When I run the following command, however, I’ll get an error due to spaces in the directory/filename structure. Note the backslash in “Program Files” is an escaped space for the shell to properly interpret this.

find .cxgames/Steam/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/steamapps/ | xargs tar -rf ~/etc/steam-settings.tar

The find command has a switch -print0 to deal with this, and xargs will process this find output format with the -0 flag. The -print0 and -0 flags tell these system utilities to print or use null-terminated strings, making it easier for shell utilities to consume the spaces in the filenames. Therefore the following command will get the files I need:

find ~/.cxgames/Steam/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/ -name "*.cfg" -print0 | xargs -0 tar -rf ~/etc/steam-settings.tar

Restoring is as simple as running the following command from within my home directory.

tar xvf ~/etc/steam-settings.tar

Perhaps some day we’ll have a Linux steam client, and a promotional TF2 item named the Unix Pipe.