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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] 38 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Or use inotifywait from inotify-tools. It logs acces <type> to specified file/folder.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 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)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

This is the way.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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!)

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

Check out the Lemmy install docs

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

well, lemmy is a webapp.

Those usually store config in some www/htdocs/config dir. Lemmy does aswell and offers LEMMY_CONFIG_LOCATION to override.