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.
~/.config
is the non-root version of/etc
these days. But you just have to know that, which isn’t ideal.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
).But what about .local/, or .appname/? It’s just a mess
~/.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
.Configuration for
root
is in/root/
, that is,root
’s home directory./etc
is for system configuration, different thing.otoh, unix directory structure is far from black magic once you know it. I have yet to see an OS that does it that elegantly (leaving aside systemd)