Hi, I checked the logs from your Steam install and I noticed a nightly steamcmd instance running to update installed games where the force_install_dir variable was being used to point steamcmd at a particular library.

On Linux both the Steam client and steamcmd share the same configuration directory per-user, so steamcmd overwrites the common libraryfolders.vdf when it runs and is configured to only have the single library resulting in that being written.

We may improve this support in the future but currently the best workaround for this setup would be running steamcmd as a different user which would get its own Steam config and could update a common library shared between them.

Originally posted by mikela:

Hi, I checked the logs from your Steam install and I noticed a nightly steamcmd instance running to update installed games where the force_install_dir variable was being used to point steamcmd at a particular library.

On Linux both the Steam client and steamcmd share the same configuration directory per-user, so steamcmd overwrites the common libraryfolders.vdf when it runs and is configured to only have the single library resulting in that being written.

We may improve this support in the future but currently the best workaround for this setup would be running steamcmd as a different user which would get its own Steam config and could update a common library shared between them.

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.

I've set up a service account instead and started the service under that user instead and will see how that gets on.

Just to report back (somewhat late), switching to a service account to run the `steamcmd` process worked.

If you have drives that aren't immediately mounted before you or the operating system starts the Steam Client, then they won't be detected.

Originally posted by mikela:

On Linux both the Steam client and steamcmd share the same configuration directory per-user, so steamcmd overwrites the common libraryfolders.vdf when it runs and is configured to only have the single library resulting in that being written.

Oddly Im getting a similar but backwards behavior...
I have a library at ~/Steam, which is where I install everything. I was playing with running a steamcmd script periodically:


This worked for the first day (I think within a single boot) perfectly. My Steam configuration never changed, and the game (Gray Zone Warfare) updated with no issues.

Then the next day, I think I rebooted... I ran the script, and two things started happening:

1. It knocked my Steam client offline (the docs say it will do this, but it didn't that first day, I swear...)

2. It made Steam forget my library at ~/Steam. Just entirely gone from the "Storage" section of settings. All games were listed as uninstalled. If I added back ~/Steam as a library, Steam would recognize the games, re-download the shader cache, and be fine.

I have no idea why these things didn't happen on the first day... I must have tested that script at least 5 times, no problem. Next day, the two issues made updating the game in that way inconvenient and pointless.

Not sure why I'm writing this, sorry to "necro" an old thread, but, very frustrating.

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.