All programs should tell you where they store config files
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.
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.
This is the way.
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 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
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 using Documents/My Games, but sadly that seems to have fractured and now there's also Saved Games, savegames, and some software has moved to using %appdata% 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 .ssh folder.
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.
What if they stored the literal files under the installation folder but then linked them under other folders classed as either Saves/configs/creations.
In theory we just need to standardize those few classifications and people could decide where that type of files can be found, always under a folder of the name of the program.
I feel with modern computing it doesn’t really make sense to only find certain files in a single location. The structure you use to create and save digital art may be wholy different from the one you use to browse/show/upload your art. I like to have all my game installations easily accessible for modding but i hate if i had to to use it to launch a game trough the exe. In a way other software may already cater to this need but its often bloated and far from standardized.
While were at it allow people to set a display name for program what they like during installations and if i want to install sm multiple times, why not allow it. the os just remembers what there actually called if other software looks for it, in case of multiple it could ask which one to use.
Of course i can dream what i want, creating new standards is probably one of the hardest thing to agree on and get done.
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
@TheBaldness
No. Static libraries are a security risk.
@wetlettuce
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.
This drives me freaking bonkers. A lot of times libraries tend not to expose the env var to discourage its usage but IF YOU MADE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE YOU HAD A USE CASE FOR IT.
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.
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.
For Linux distros everything should use XDG_CONFIG_HOME and distros should start refusing to package anything that doesn't.
It would be huge if a distro like Fedora did that
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...
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_HOME and $XDG_DATA_HOME?
Sadly, what we seem to have over and over is https://xkcd.com/927/
It’s getting better though
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.
read the man page
The good ol' RTFM
this is not really what the article is about.
yes you can read man page, you can find there all possible locations of config files. yet you still don't know where config file is stored. you have to check all the possible locations.
also if there would be some standard so you can query app for its config files, you could make automated backups easily. at least much easier that now.
of course I understand this is completely unrealistic, in software world everyone will do whatever they want..
For real. Usually the config file locations is at the bottom, so jumping to it is quick.
@wetlettuce
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.
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.
For user-specific config files, aren't they all supposed to be in ~/.config these days? I've never heard of software using ~/etc.
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.
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)
Seriously, I've lost so muuuuch time just trying to find where some random program decides to store its config files. It sometimes takes me more time than actually "doing the config"
Fortunately half of apps use dconf nowadays
(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.
Do things stay in that list when they are not used (since they would be opened and closed in far less than a second)? If so that's pretty cool.
If not, you can use Process Monitor to check this. That's what I usually do.
The nix equivalent is the lsof command. This doesn't help you finding out in which hierarchy config files are parsed when the program accesses multiple ones, which is often the case.
If it's not in /etc it should be in the directory the exe file is located.
~/.config is the non-root version of /etc these 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_HOME for configs and $XDG_STATE_HOME for state. If they aren't available, use the defaults (./config and .local/share).
Configuration for root is in /root/, that is, root's home directory. /etc is for system configuration, different thing.
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.
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.
It puts it's Configs in /etc/ or it gets the hose again.
I think this is a drawback of not having more specialized communities in beehaw yet - I'm not sure if this advice is very niche advice or if it has some value in general awareness for the layperson?
Normally I'd look up and see "r/DevChat" or some such distinct community name and have immediate context of, "that's not really for you to figure out". But this is essentially "r/technology" so I'm left wondering if I personally can take anything of value from this post.
Not a criticism or complaint, just an observation.
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 gui it 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.