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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If it’s not in /etc it should be in the directory the exe file is located.

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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.

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Well good because a program shouldn’t be writing to its config file either.

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~/.config is the non-root version of /etc these days. But you just have to know that, which isn’t ideal.

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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).

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