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.

  • KIM_JONG_JUICEBOX@beehaw.org
    10·
    2 years 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
      3·
      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!)

      • KIM_JONG_JUICEBOX@beehaw.org
        1·
        2 years ago

        Interesting. I have not heard of this tools. But you say specified file or folder, that means you already know the file location?

        • Leirda@lemm.ee
          2·
          1 year ago

          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-tools just exposes them)

  • exu@feditown.com
    9·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • uyuu@lemmy.4d2.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      For real. Usually the config file locations is at the bottom, so jumping to it is quick.

    • aacid@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      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…

  • SFaulken@kbin.social
    4·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
      5·
      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.

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
      5·
      2 years 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
        7·
        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).

        • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
          3·
          2 years 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
        2·
        1 year ago

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

  • The Baldness@beehaw.org
    3·
    2 years ago

    I’d take it a step further and say that all programs should be completely self-contained in one folder.

    • stom@beehaw.org
      6·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • TehPers@beehaw.org
        3·
        2 years ago

        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.

      • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • stom@beehaw.org
          1·
          1 year ago

          Yep. My main gripe is that due to various developers not catching up with new standards, a users files can be scattered all over the place.

          I appreciate that - in theory - %appdata% should contain just a users files, but a number of apps also use it to store program data leading to a huge folder size. My own is >100GB, with some of the largest offenders being python and node dependencies that are not specific to myself, and could really be cached somewhere else.

        • TheAnymouseProphet@mastodon.social
          4·
          1 year ago

          @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.

    • araquen@beehaw.org
      0·
      2 years ago

      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

      • nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        2 years ago

        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

      • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
        0·
        2 years ago

        Who told that dev my Documents folder is where their nonsense needs to go? That Documents folder is for my use, not theirs.

        Microsoft did for a while. 😜

        • itchychips@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          There are so many places that games decide to put their save files on Windows.

          I’ve got save directories in:

          • %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\Saved Games (only Elite Dangerous)
          • Documents (Mass Effect Andromeda, X4: Foundations, EVE Online, GreedFall, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, SteamVR)
          • Documents\My Games
          • %APPDATA%
          • %LOCALAPPDATA%
          • %APPDATA%..\LocalLow (does not seem to have an environment variable defined for this one)
          • Various game install directories

          There’s probably other places. Not sure how much the registry is used for saves, either, but that would complicate backups more than they already are.

          I’d love if they just unify save and config data for games to %APPDATA%. Documents should never be touched by software without the user’s explicit consent, though, and because of the situation, the Documents directory is the last place I ever put actual documents.

  • bionade24@kbin.social
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • exu@feditown.com
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • dan@upvote.au
      4·
      1 year ago

      For user-specific config files, aren’t they all supposed to be in ~/.config these days? I’ve never heard of software using ~/etc.

  • lillesael@feddit.dk
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • eclipse@beehaw.org
    2·
    2 years ago

    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”

  • I_Miss_Daniel@kbin.social
    2·
    2 years ago

    (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.

  • jonne@infosec.pub
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Rexelpitlum@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      2 years ago

      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…

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      2 years ago

      For Linux distros everything should use XDG_CONFIG_HOME and distros should start refusing to package anything that doesn’t.

  • Sharmat@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • eleanor@social.hamington.netEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

        • Sharmat@beehaw.orgEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          Does the nix configuration file contain also the config files of the programs within it?

          • acow@beehaw.orgEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            Mixed. Many folks use home-manager to configure their user environment with nix, and you can specify config files there. However, escape hatches to use regular files not managed by nix exist to make config tweaking faster. You can specify your config file contents in nix, which works well for server deployments, but for desktop use it usually ends up being a mix of seldom-changed config going in the nix definitions, and other things that, say, revolve around GUI tools for config tweaking (eg KDE apps) continuing to do their own thing.

  • Xeelee@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    With Synaptic, you can show all files associated with a package. That includes config files. Saved me a lot of hassle on numerous occasions.

    • KIM_JONG_JUICEBOX@beehaw.org
      1·
      2 years ago

      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)