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
    1·
    1 year 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
      1·
      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!)

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
      0·
      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
      0·
      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
        1·
        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).

    • araquen@beehaw.org
      0·
      1 year 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