this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
766 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37747 readers
278 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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
(Windows) Resource Monitor, disk tab, tick the process, see what files it opens and closes.
Also the usual %programdata% and the two %appdata% find most things.
Do things stay in that list when they are not used (since they would be opened and closed in far less than a second)? If so that's pretty cool.
If not, you can use Process Monitor to check this. That's what I usually do.
Unless it's using the Registry for some config values.
True. That's harder to track down.
The *nix equivalent is the
lsofcommand. This doesn't help you finding out in which hierarchy config files are parsed when the program accesses multiple ones, which is often the case.You can use something like
strace -eopen -f -o strace.out the_programto find all files that the program tried or succeeded to open. Then you can try to find the config file(s) in strace.out.There's also a nice version in perftools that can be given a PID. https://github.com/brendangregg/perf-tools/blob/master/opensnoop
I was digging through the comments for exactly this, thanks!
You still don't know which location is preffered and how get they get merged. In my experience, digging into the source is the most straighforward. But my usual problem is more that the config option doesn't do at all what the documentation says it does.
Wouldn't the strace.out file be in chronological order?
Yes, though if two different files allow for the same config key - you're stuck opening both to check
And you still couldn't be sure, could be parsed the other way around for historic reasons.
Just reading the source code (if possible ofc) is imho easier than reading.
True, though I had to use strace method on closed source binaries before (zoom)