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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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[-] WildfireFailure@programming.dev 9 points 1 year ago

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

[-] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 10 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 9 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).

[-] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

But what about .local/, or .appname/? It's just a mess

[-] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

~/.local is the non-root version of /usr. By .appname do 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.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Configuration for root is in /root/, that is, root's home directory. /etc is for system configuration, different thing.

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

otoh, unix directory structure is far from black magic once you know it. I have yet to see an OS that does it that elegantly (leaving aside systemd)

[-] Atemu@lemmy.ml 5 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.

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

I agree. Usually I'm referring to a user installed local application. So if the executable is in your home directory likely it's in the same directory as the exe.

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

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