this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
792 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37800 readers
316 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
alyaza@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org
gyrfalcon@beehaw.org
rs5th@beehaw.org
coldredlight@beehaw.org
Los@beehaw.org
SemioticStandard@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social
remington@beehaw.org
792
All programs should tell you where they store config files (utcc.utoronto.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by wet_lettuce@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
97 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] KIM_JONG_JUICEBOX@beehaw.org 39 points 2 years 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.

[–] Dohnakun@lemmy.fmhy.ml 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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

[–] KIM_JONG_JUICEBOX@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years 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?

[–] leirda@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years 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)

[–] Smk@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 years ago

This is the way.

[–] heeplr@feddit.de 3 points 2 years 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!)

[–] KIM_JONG_JUICEBOX@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Check out the Lemmy install docs

[–] heeplr@feddit.de 2 points 2 years 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.