Technology

37747 readers

254 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

[email protected]

803

All programs should tell you where they store config files (utcc.utoronto.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

99 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

[–] [email protected] 39 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] 13 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] 2 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.