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I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can't tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.

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[-] KIM_JONG_JUICEBOX@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago

Start your application / program with “strace” and see all the files it opens.

Also run “lsof” on a running process to see what files it has open.

[-] heeplr@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

I doubt that's a linux problem. All apps store config in /etc, ~/.*rc or ~/.config

Everything else should be considered a bug (looking at you, systemd!)

[-] WildfireFailure@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago

If it's not in /etc it should be in the directory the exe file is located.

[-] Atemu@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago

Certainly not. Nothing should write to /usr/bin except for the package manager in FHS distros and some distros binary directories aren't writable at all.

[-] intensely_human@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Well good because a program shouldn’t be writing to its config file either.

[-] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 year ago

~/.config is the non-root version of /etc these days. But you just have to know that, which isn't ideal.

[-] Jummit@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you are a developer, please take a look at the XDG Base Directory Specification and try to follow it, users will be very grateful.

Short summary: Look for $XDG_CONFIG_HOME for configs and $XDG_STATE_HOME for state. If they aren't available, use the defaults (./config and .local/share).

this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
17 points (100.0% liked)

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