I am currently researching a Dropbox-based preference syncing solution for Mac OS X. In my research, I came across a really handy terminal tip. If you want to symbolically link (ln -s source target) a file or folder to another location that follows a named pattern, such as com.adobe.*, you can supply the pattern for the link source parameter.
For example, running this command:
iMac:DropBoxPreferenceSync brandon$ ln -s ~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.\* .And then calling a file listing, will result in this:
iMac:DropBoxPreferenceSync brandon$ ls -l total 288 lrwxr-xr-x 1 brandon wheel 62 Mar 2 09:21 com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro.plist lrwxr-xr-x 1 brandon wheel 70 Mar 2 09:21 com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro\_x86\_8.0.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro\_x86\_8.0.plist lrwxr-xr-x 1 brandon wheel 70 Mar 2 09:21 com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro\_x86\_9.0.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro\_x86\_9.0.plist lrwxr-xr-x 1 brandon wheel 66 Mar 2 09:21 com.adobe.AdobeOnlineHelp.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.AdobeOnlineHelp.plist lrwxr-xr-x 1 brandon wheel 66 Mar 2 09:21 com.adobe.CSXSPreferences.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.CSXSPreferences.plist lrwxr-xr-x 1 brandon wheel 63 Mar 2 09:21 com.adobe.DNGConverter.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.DNGConverter.plist lrwxr-xr-x 1 brandon wheel 59 Mar 2 09:21 com.adobe.InDesign.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.InDesign.plist
etc…
One note, if you are linking the files to your current folder, remember to add the final period (com.adobe.* .), otherwise it will generate a weird linking situation where the OS will report "too many symbolic links". I hope this comes in handy for you!