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.
It puts it’s Configs in /etc/ or it gets the hose again.
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.
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!)
Check out the Lemmy install docs
well, lemmy is a webapp.
Those usually store config in some
www/htdocs/configdir. Lemmy does aswell and offersLEMMY_CONFIG_LOCATIONto override.
Or use inotifywait from inotify-tools. It logs acces <type> to specified file/folder.
Interesting. I have not heard of this tools. But you say specified file or folder, that means you already know the file location?
You can call it recursively on
.config(for instance), and watch for specific events (creation, deletion, modification, etc). But I expect this to be expensive on really large folders and I’d avoid it if I could.Btw it’s syscalls iirc (
inotify-toolsjust exposes them)
I mean, that’s sort of what xdg is intended to accomplish, with making $HOME/.config be the place, but it’s kind of up to the individual software developers to comply. (Yes, I know, this doesn’t really apply to Windows/Mac OS) But yeah, it would really be nice if configs/config locations were even remotely standardized.
There’s also $HOME/.local/share for ‘static data files’ as part of XDG.
which is not config files. ~/.local is just user specific override for /usr
obligitory windows user here to say that not only should every program should tell you where they are, but should also use them, or have a way to import configs via the command line. very frustrating to discover powershell automation is impossible for a program because
i am too lazy/stupid to figure out how to automate the guiit doesn’t have any way to modify configs without navigating the gui, cough cough winaero tweaker but this is only because i am an windows user, and i stubbornly refuse to learn how to use linux until absolutely necessary.And even if the program doesn’t use config files (like various gnome, xfce and other programs), it should be possible to programmatically export and import full or partial configurations.
(Windows) Resource Monitor, disk tab, tick the process, see what files it opens and closes.
Also the usual %programdata% and the two %appdata% find most things.
I don’t know if you mean on linux but in my experience I have found the bottom part of the first man page usually has a section on config file locations.
If it’s not in /etc it should be in the directory the exe file is located.
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.
Well good because a program shouldn’t be writing to its config file either.
~/.configis the non-root version of/etcthese days. But you just have to know that, which isn’t ideal.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
$XDG_CONFIG_HOMEfor configs and$XDG_STATE_HOMEfor state. If they aren’t available, use the defaults (./configand.local/share).But what about .local/, or .appname/? It’s just a mess
~/.localis the non-root version of/usr. By.appnamedo you just mean a folder that a specific app made in your home for itself? Yeah, I never condone that. imo that’s just a badly behaving app. It should move that folder into~/.config.
What I find more frustrating is undocumented environment variables to override config locations.
The amount of times I’ve had to dig through the source code for a CLI to find an environment variable to force the config somewhere should be zero. But it’s not.
I genuinely do not like apps using environment variables for config if they aren’t running in their own contained environment. It makes me uncomfortable.
What’s imho worse is how often config options or command flags don’t actually do at all what’s described in the manpage. I then have to dig into the source code once again and since you have to read through the whole behaviour it takes much longer than just looking up where the program tries to read config files.
Please - if you find such wrong docs in Open source software, submit a fix to the doc. It’s as important as normal bugfixes.
I’d take it a step further and say that all programs should be completely self-contained in one folder.
That doesn’t work well for… well, most software I can think of.
Games: I do not want to backup the entire folder to ensure I have my save files. Modern games are huge. I want my saves to be located somewhere easy to get to (for the average user) and be quick to backup, without having to go in and cherry-pick specific files.
There was a good trend of usingDocuments/My Games, but sadly that seems to have fractured and now there’s alsoSaved Games,savegames, and some software has moved to usingappdata%or just storing saves in the game install location. There’s no consistency, it’s a real pain in the hole.DCC software (Blender, Photoshop, whatever): user preferences and config files. Again, I idon’t want to backup the entire software, as I’m likely to reinstall it from an official source when migraing/reinstalling to ensure I have the latest updates. However I do want to be able to backup my preferences or plugins easily.
Any software that allows users to customise it: let me backup those preferences without cloning the entire app.
I do wish there was a standardised folder struture for user data, but it’s 2023 and the chances of getting Windows/Max/Nix to agree upon and comform to a generic structure as sadly. The only thing I can think of that’s the same across platforms is the
.sshfolder.I don’t think Win/Mac/*nix need to use the same structure across different OSs, but it would be nice if applications used conventional paths for within each of those OSs.
The different OSes generally have a prescription for where to put things. Windows is a stickler about Program Files and the only thing that should exist there is install content.
My Games and Saved Games is a remnant of times past when they were trying to figure out where to put that stuff. Generally, %Appdata% is where they recommend storing config and files that your application may mutate over time. e.g save files or logs
They just decided it didn’t make sense to break that stuff up and not every application dev has caught up to that.
For Mac, the /Library/Application \Support directory is where config files should live. Though some apps support /Users/<user>/.config for account level configs.
For Linux, as others have pointed out, /etc for global config or /home/<user>/.config for account level config.
The frustration about not knowing where to find things either comes from not knowing the standards or developers not following them. (Or Microsoft changing them every 2 versions)
Edit: Mac uses Users not home.
deleted by creator
Doh, you’re of course correct. Thanks! It’s fixed
This is the big thing I miss from my “pre-Unix” Mac days. In OS9 and earlier, apps were self contained, and didn’t spread their garbage everywhere. You deleted an app, you deleted all the app. Granted, there was a tradeoff (the parade of conflicting control panels and extensions you had to manually diagnose when your machine went sideways) but I never understood why in the Windows and Linux worlds devs would code so sloppily. Who told that dev my Documents folder is where their nonsense needs to go? That Documents folder is for my use, not theirs.
Still salty after all these years
I use linux and this annoys me to, every program just spams my home directory with config files, even though .config and .cache exist and are the standard
Programming tools/IDEs seem especially egregious.
.android .cargo .choosenim .conda .emacs.d .nimble .npm .rustupSet XDG_CONFIG_HOME=<path> in your environment and most tools follow it
I have, unfortunatly a lot of programs dont.
Right, forgot. And the specific workaround.
@TheBaldness
No. Static libraries are a security risk.
@wet_lettuceIsn’t this what updates are for? maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by static libraries.
@TheBaldness
When you bundle everything for an app inside a self-contained directory, it’s no different than static linking a binary.An exploit in a library the package links against means that application is still vulnerable even if the same library on the operating system has been updated to fix the security flaw.
Apple managed to do it for a long time. I imagine they update the app more frequently than they would otherwise.
@TheBaldness
For apps that Apple controls that may be fine, but most people do not get their apps from a single vendor and not all vendors are fast at pushing updates.
It would be amazing yeah, standardising all user config files in the $HOME, and maybe etc/ or an default, non usable, user profile to store the original versions, in case of a bad config or corrupted file would save so much time debugging stuff.
Like
$XDG_CONFIG_HOMEand$XDG_DATA_HOME?The XDG Base Directory standard has kinda sorta been doing that; and I like it. Not everything supports it; and it’s not perfect, but at least it’s better than the wild west that application configs used to be.
I guess the difficulty here is that sometimes that decision is made by the package manager, not the developer. You’ll see Debian distros using a different location compared to a red hat one, while Mac OS is again different, so it might be hard for a developer to tell you where it is.
Still, some kind of universal CLI flag that tells you where the binary/service looks for configuration would be a great idea.
And also: where it found the config file it is actually using at the moment. This would cover the 90% of the cases in which you just want to change a single Key to a different value or something or so…
For Linux distros everything should use
XDG_CONFIG_HOMEand distros should start refusing to package anything that doesn’t.
With Synaptic, you can show all files associated with a package. That includes config files. Saved me a lot of hassle on numerous occasions.
Yeah anything installed via a package manager, like an rpm or deb package, you can query to see what files belong to that package. Problem is they often have default config file locations, like in your home dir, where they will not ship and install files. (Though they might create them as part of a post install process)
@wet_lettuce
Should be /etc or /usr/local/etc or /opt/etc or /opt/vendor/product/etc or ~/etc.With some exceptions for historic compatibility (like ~/.bashrc)
The man page should specify where.
For user-specific config files, aren’t they all supposed to be in
~/.configthese days? I’ve never heard of software using~/etc.The exceptions should only apply for cases where XDG is not available. In any other case, the appropriate XDG directoy configured by the user should be used first.
