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Tamás Szelei
Asked: 2011-05-14 00:43:39 +0800 CST

What is the preferred way to store application settings?

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From a developer's perspective. Should I use a text-based config in /etc or in $HOME? Or something else?

development

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If you are talking about a system wide daemon, a file in /etc is appropriate. If you are talking about an application that should have per-user settings, the home directory is appropriate. For new apps, it would be a good idea to follow the XDG Base Directory specification:

    http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

    This basically states that you should store your config files in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, which defaults to ~/.config

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