All programs should tell you where they store config files

wet_lettuce@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 757 points –
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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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@wet_lettuce
Should be /etc or /usr/local/etc or /opt/etc or /opt/vendor/product/etc or ~/etc.

With some exceptions for historic compatibility (like ~/.bashrc)

The man page should specify where.

The exceptions should only apply for cases where XDG is not available. In any other case, the appropriate XDG directoy configured by the user should be used first.

For user-specific config files, aren't they all supposed to be in ~/.config these days? I've never heard of software using ~/etc.