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All programs should tell you where they store config files (utcc.utoronto.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It would be huge if a distro like Fedora did that

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year 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...